While CTO at Pandora, Tom Conrad Had Them Building Their iPhone App Before the iPhone SDK Was Released
Speaking of new (“interim”) Sonos CEO Tom Conrad and Scott Forstall, here’s an interesting anecdote from Tyler Hall’s terrific piece for Motherboard in 2021, “How Pandora Won Its Royalty Battle but Lost the War to Spotify”:
After pushback on only allowing web apps for the iPhone, Steve
Jobs announced that native apps would be coming to the iPhone. In
the interim, Apple Senior Vice President Scott Forstall invited
Tim Westergren and his CTO, Tom Conrad, over to a local Cupertino
lunch spot. The trio talked for hours about what Pandora had
learned about streaming audio from putting apps on flip phones,
like Motorola’s RAZR, for wireless carriers. The meeting ended
with a question for Forstall.
“What, if anything, can we do at Pandora to get ready for the next
generation of iPhone that includes an app store and native APIs?”
asked Conrad. “Forstall said, it wouldn’t be a waste of your time
to jailbreak some iPhones and use the kind of back door toolkits
that were being distributed by other people to build a native
Pandora app while we get our act together at Apple on something
more formal.”
So, Conrad, designer Dan Lythcott-Haines, and many others on the
team got to work jailbreaking iPhones and working on a Pandora
iPhone app ahead of the official APK release. Then, on day one of
the App Store launch, Pandora was the first internet radio app
available. Nine months later the Pandora app was installed on 21
percent of iPhones.
I first linked to this article back in 2021, when it was published, but it seemed perfect for a re-link now in light of Conrad’s new role at Sonos. The more I learn about Conrad, the more he sounds like the right man for the job there.
(Via Tyler Hall himself, on Bluesky, which you should join if you haven’t already.)
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Speaking of new (“interim”) Sonos CEO Tom Conrad and Scott Forstall, here’s an interesting anecdote from Tyler Hall’s terrific piece for Motherboard in 2021, “How Pandora Won Its Royalty Battle but Lost the War to Spotify”:
After pushback on only allowing web apps for the iPhone, Steve
Jobs announced that native apps would be coming to the iPhone. In
the interim, Apple Senior Vice President Scott Forstall invited
Tim Westergren and his CTO, Tom Conrad, over to a local Cupertino
lunch spot. The trio talked for hours about what Pandora had
learned about streaming audio from putting apps on flip phones,
like Motorola’s RAZR, for wireless carriers. The meeting ended
with a question for Forstall.
“What, if anything, can we do at Pandora to get ready for the next
generation of iPhone that includes an app store and native APIs?”
asked Conrad. “Forstall said, it wouldn’t be a waste of your time
to jailbreak some iPhones and use the kind of back door toolkits
that were being distributed by other people to build a native
Pandora app while we get our act together at Apple on something
more formal.”
So, Conrad, designer Dan Lythcott-Haines, and many others on the
team got to work jailbreaking iPhones and working on a Pandora
iPhone app ahead of the official APK release. Then, on day one of
the App Store launch, Pandora was the first internet radio app
available. Nine months later the Pandora app was installed on 21
percent of iPhones.
I first linked to this article back in 2021, when it was published, but it seemed perfect for a re-link now in light of Conrad’s new role at Sonos. The more I learn about Conrad, the more he sounds like the right man for the job there.
(Via Tyler Hall himself, on Bluesky, which you should join if you haven’t already.)