Scott Forstall was the Apple executive who led the software organization behind the iPhone. A Stanford graduate, he joined NeXT under Steve Jobs and followed Jobs to Apple when Apple acquired NeXT in 1996. There he rose through the Mac OS X software ranks and was eventually placed in charge of the team that built the operating system for the original iPhone, the platform first called iPhone OS and later renamed iOS.
Forstall’s role and the team he led are documented in a rare firsthand account: the June 20, 2017 Computer History Museum event “Putting Your Finger On It: Creating the iPhone,” in which Forstall spoke publicly for the first time since leaving Apple in 2012, in conversation with museum historian John Markoff and alongside original iPhone engineers Hugo Fiennes, Nitin Ganatra, and Scott Herz. In the museum’s own account of the evening, Ganatra recalled the moment the project began: “One day Scott did walk into my office and closed the door behind him and said we’re starting this new phone project.” The discussion centered on Jobs’s insistence on a multitouch, finger-driven interface rather than the stylus-based approach Apple’s team associated with Microsoft’s tablets.
When the iPhone launched in 2007, Apple’s initial development model for third parties was not a native SDK but web applications running in the iPhone’s WebKit-based Safari. The original App Store and its native SDK arrived in 2008, and Forstall was its most prominent internal champion, leading the software platform that turned the iPhone into a developer ecosystem. The store and the iOS frameworks he oversaw, including the UIKit application layer, became the foundation of the modern mobile app economy.
Forstall’s tenure ended abruptly in late 2012. After the troubled launch of Apple Maps, which replaced Google Maps as the default mapping application in iOS 6 and drew heavy criticism for inaccurate data, Apple announced an executive reorganization and Forstall departed the company. His responsibilities were redistributed, with design leadership over iOS passing to Jony Ive, a shift that set the stage for the flat-design redesign of iOS 7 the following year.
After Apple, Forstall stepped away from the technology industry and became a Broadway theater producer. His public reappearance at the Computer History Museum in 2017 remains one of the few firsthand records of how the iPhone software team operated, and of his own central role in shaping the device’s operating system and its application platform.