WebBuilding

Devices and hardware

iPhone

Summary

The iPhone is Apple's line of touchscreen smartphones. Apple announced it on January 9, 2007, and it went on sale in the United States on June 29, 2007, with a version of the Safari browser that Apple said could show any web page the way it was designed to be seen. It never ran Adobe Flash, and its ways of fitting the web onto a small screen, such as the viewport meta tag, helped shape responsive web design. As of September 2026, StatCounter counted iOS on 53.59% of mobile page views in the United States.

Web Building Encyclopedia · Devices and hardware · Last reviewed October 22, 2026 · 10 min read

Announcement and launch

Apple announced the iPhone on January 9, 2007. Its press release described one device that was three things at once: a mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls and “a breakthrough Internet communications device.”1 It had a 3.5-inch widescreen display and was priced at $499 for a 4GB model and $599 for an 8GB model.1

The web was part of the pitch from the first day. The iPhone ran a version of Apple’s Safari web browser, could reach the web over Wi-Fi or EDGE (an early mobile data network), and had Google and Yahoo search built in.1 Apple’s claim for the browser was direct: users could “see any web page the way it was designed to be seen,” and tap to zoom into parts of it.1

The phone went on sale in the United States on Friday, June 29, 2007, at 6:00 p.m. local time. Apple’s release that week called it “the Internet in your pocket.”2 Apple had said in January that Europe would follow in late 2007 and Asia in 2008.1

On July 27, 2016, Apple said it had recently sold its billionth iPhone.3

Safari on the iPhone: the full web on a small screen

Apple’s promise was that the iPhone would show the same pages people saw on a computer.1 Doing that on a 3.5-inch screen needed a trick, and the trick shaped how websites have been built since.

Safari on the iPhone drew each page on an imaginary canvas, called the viewport, that was wider than the screen. Apple’s developer guide gave the default width as 980 pixels.4 The page was laid out as if on a desktop monitor and then shrunk to fit, and the reader zoomed and panned with their fingers. MDN, Mozilla’s developer reference, describes the same mechanism: a virtual viewport wider than the screen, shrunk to fit, which the user zooms and pans.5

To let a site opt out of that zoomed-out view, Apple supported a line of HTML called the viewport meta tag. A page that includes it can tell the browser to make the viewport as wide as the device, with content such as width=device-width, and can also set the starting zoom level.4 Apple’s guide advised that a page designed for iPhone or iPod touch should set its width to the width of the device.4

The tag spread far beyond Apple. MDN now recommends width=device-width as the standard setting, and explains that without it, layouts aimed at narrow screens may never be used, because the browser thinks it has 980 pixels to fill.5 The W3C‘s CSS Viewport Module, still an editor’s draft as of August 29, 2026, sets out how browsers should read the tag. Its parsing rules say they were “produced from testing Safari on the iPhone.”6

Touch was the other change. A page built for a mouse expects clicks and hovering. WebKit engineers developed a model of touch events for scripts, and the W3C’s Touch Events standard, a Recommendation from October 10, 2013, thanks them for “developing the model used as a basis for this spec.”7

No Flash: plug-ins, “Thoughts on Flash” and the end of the plug-in web

One part of the desktop web never came to the iPhone: Adobe Flash, a browser plug-in (an add-on program that runs content the browser cannot run by itself) used for video, animation and interactive content. Safari on iOS did not run it. Apple’s own developer guide lists Flash, Java applets and plug-in installation as unsupported, and says Safari on iOS does not support third-party plug-ins in general.8 The same guide told developers not to show alerts asking iPhone users to download Flash.8

On April 29, 2010, Steve Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, explained the decision in an open letter on Apple’s website titled “Thoughts on Flash.”910 AppleInsider summed up his points as openness, the “full Web,” reliability, security and performance, battery life, touch, and the substandard quality of third-party development tools.10

  • Open standards. Jobs called Flash 100% proprietary, controlled by Adobe alone, and said Apple backed HTML5, CSS and JavaScript instead.9
  • Battery life. He wrote that mobile devices need to decode video in hardware for long battery life, and that on an iPhone H.264 video played for up to 10 hours, against under 5 hours for video decoded in software.10
  • Touch. He wrote that “Flash was designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers,” pointing to rollovers, effects that appear when a mouse hovers over something.109

Eighteen months later Adobe changed course on phones. On November 9, 2011, it said it would stop developing Flash Player for mobile browsers after version 11.1 and called HTML5 “the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms.”11 Flash on desktops lasted longer: Adobe stopped supporting Flash Player on December 31, 2020, and blocked Flash content from January 12, 2021.12 See end of Adobe Flash.

From web apps to the App Store

At first Apple offered outside developers only the web. On June 11, 2007, before the phone shipped, it said the iPhone would run third-party applications “created with Web 2.0 Internet standards,” the standards associated with Web 2.0 sites.13 Apple’s case was that such apps could look and behave like the built-in ones, could make calls, send email and show places in Google Maps, and could be updated by changing the code on the developer’s own servers.13

A software update announced on January 15, 2008, added Web Clips: icons on the Home Screen that open a chosen website, even at the spot the user had zoomed into.14 Apple’s developer guide explained how a site could supply its own Home Screen icon with a file named apple-touch-icon.png, and how a meta tag called apple-mobile-web-app-capable could open a web app without Safari’s address bar and buttons, a mode Apple called standalone.15

Native apps followed. Apple released a beta software development kit (SDK) for iPhone apps on March 6, 2008, and previewed the App Store at the same time. More than 100,000 developers downloaded the kit in its first four days.16 The App Store opened on July 10, 2008, with 551 programs available, Fortune counted.17 On July 14, Apple said users had downloaded more than 10 million apps in the first weekend, and that more than 800 native apps were available.18

The App Store gave businesses a second way to reach iPhone users, alongside a website. Apple’s review rules still draw a line between the two: an app is expected to offer more than a repackaged website, and one that is not useful, unique or “app-like” does not belong in the store.19

Responsive design and the mobile majority

By 2010 some companies were asking designers for a separate “iPhone website.” Ethan Marcotte’s article “Responsive Web Design,” published in A List Apart on May 25, 2010, proposed one site that adapts to every screen instead.20 He named three technical ingredients: “Fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries.”20 Media queries are CSS rules that apply only at certain screen widths, and Marcotte noted they had become a popular way of serving a tailored style sheet to “the iPhone, Android phones, and their ilk.”20 The approach depends on the viewport meta tag, because without it a phone reports a 980-pixel viewport and the narrow-screen rules never run.5 See Ethan Marcotte.

Traffic followed the phones. StatCounter, a web analytics company, reported that mobile and tablet devices made up 51.3% of internet use worldwide in October 2016, against 48.7% for desktop, the first month that had happened.21 Google now uses the mobile version of a site’s content for indexing and ranking, and recommends responsive web design as “the easiest design pattern to implement and maintain.”22 See mobile-first indexing.

As of September 2026, StatCounter’s figures are:

Measure (September 2026)WorldwideUnited States
Mobile share of page views (all platforms)58.99%49.1%
Desktop share of page views39.26%48.47%
iOS share of mobile page views30.81%53.59%
Android share of mobile page views69.17%46.39%

Sources for the table: platform shares worldwide23 and in the United States24, and mobile operating system shares worldwide25 and in the United States.26 Among mobile browsers worldwide, Safari had 24.71% of page views in September 2026, second to Chrome at 67.64%.27 These figures measure web use, not devices sold. In the United States, more than half of mobile page views came from iOS, while worldwide Android phones held more than two-thirds.

Safari, WebKit and the rules for browsers on iOS

Safari on the iPhone is built on WebKit, which its project describes as the browser engine used by Safari, Mail, the App Store and many other apps on macOS, iOS and Linux.28 A rendering engine, or browser engine, is the part of a browser that turns code into the page on screen. Apple’s App Review Guidelines say apps that browse the web “must use the appropriate WebKit framework and WebKit JavaScript.”19 So Chrome, Firefox and other browsers on the iPhone have long been different buttons and menus around the same WebKit engine. The web browser and browser wars entries cover the engines themselves.

Safari is also tied to the operating system. Apple says the way to get the latest Safari is to install the latest operating system updates for the device.29 A phone that can no longer update its operating system keeps an older Safari, and an older version of every WebKit-based browser on it.

The rule now has exceptions. The same guideline lets developers apply for an entitlement (a special permission from Apple) to use another engine, and links to the terms for the European Union and Japan.19 Apple’s page for the EU says these capabilities need at least iOS 17.4 or iPadOS 18, and that a dedicated browser app with another engine must be distributed only in the EU.30 Its page for Japan allows other engines from iOS 26.2, for apps distributed only in Japan.31 In practice the change has been slow to reach users. Open Web Advocacy, a group that campaigns for browser competition, wrote on July 14, 2025, that no browser vendor had yet brought a competing engine to iOS.32 GIGAZINE reported on June 18, 2026, that a Microsoft Edge group product manager had built a research prototype running Google’s Blink engine on iOS, and that no major browser with its own engine had been released to the public.33

Web apps and PWAs on iOS today

Apple’s 2007 idea of web apps returned under a new name. A progressive web app (PWA) is a website that can be installed like an app, with its own icon, its own window and features such as notifications, described in a file called a web app manifest. On iOS, Apple calls these Home Screen web apps.

  • Notifications, 2023. On February 16, 2023, WebKit announced Web Push for Home Screen web apps in iOS and iPadOS 16.4, along with app icon badges. A web app may ask for permission to send notifications only in response to something the user does, such as tapping a subscribe button. The same release let other browsers on iOS offer Add to Home Screen.34
  • The EU episode, 2024. In February 2024 Apple removed Home Screen web apps for EU users in the second beta of iOS 17.4. It said the EU’s Digital Markets Act required support for other browser engines, and that making web apps safe on those engines would need a new architecture it judged impractical given low use. European Commission officials were reported to be examining the decision.35 On March 1, 2024, Apple reversed course and said it would continue to offer the existing capability in the EU, with web apps still built directly on WebKit and its security architecture.3635
  • Other engines, from 2024. Apple’s documentation lists a class called SFAddToHomeScreenInfo, available from iOS 18.2, through which a browser hands the system a web app’s manifest and cookies when someone adds it to the Home Screen.37 9to5Mac reported in October 2024 that this would let EU browsers with their own engines add web apps.38 Open Web Advocacy wrote in July 2025 that Apple had given no indication it would share the ability to install and manage web apps with other engines.32 The two accounts do not agree, and with no such browser released to the public as of June 2026, the question had not been tested in use.33
  • Every site a web app, 2025. In its June 9, 2025, notes on the Safari 26 beta, WebKit announced that by default every website added to the Home Screen on iOS and iPadOS opens as a web app, with nothing required beyond an HTML file and a URL. Users can turn off “Open as Web App” to get a plain bookmark that opens in their browser.39

Apple’s EU developer page, which lists terms updated through August 2026, describes alternative browser engines but says nothing about removing Home Screen web apps.40 The sources checked for this entry, as of October 2026, report no second removal in the EU since Apple’s March 2024 reversal.

Timeline

  1. WebKit says every site added to the Home Screen will open as a web app by default39
  2. Apple says Home Screen web apps will continue in the EU, built on WebKit36
  3. Apple removes Home Screen web apps for EU users in an iOS 17.4 beta35
  4. WebKit announces Web Push for Home Screen web apps in iOS 16.434
  5. Mobile and tablet page views pass desktop worldwide for the first time, per StatCounter21
  6. Apple says it has sold its billionth iPhone3
  7. Adobe stops developing Flash Player for mobile browsers11
  8. Ethan Marcotte publishes "Responsive Web Design" in A List Apart20
  9. Steve Jobs publishes "Thoughts on Flash"9
  10. The App Store opens with 551 apps17
  11. Apple releases the beta iPhone SDK and previews the App Store16
  12. Apple announces Web Clips, Home Screen icons for websites14
  13. iPhone goes on sale in the United States2
  14. Apple says third-party iPhone apps will be built with Web 2.0 standards13
  15. Apple announces the iPhone, with a version of Safari1

What it means for your website

More than half of web page views worldwide came from mobile devices in September 2026, and in the United States iOS accounted for 53.59% of mobile page views.2326 For many small businesses the iPhone is the first screen a new customer sees. A few checks cover most of what matters.

  • Keep the viewport tag. Every modern theme and builder should add <meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width”> to each page. Without it, phones lay the page out 980 pixels wide and your mobile styles never apply.54 If a page looks tiny on a phone, this is the first thing to check. See responsive design.
  • Do not block zooming. Avoid user-scalable=no, which turns off zooming. MDN warns it stops people with low vision from reading the page, and notes that WCAG requires at least 2x scaling.5
  • Test in real Safari. On an iPhone every browser draws pages with WebKit outside Apple’s EU and Japan exceptions, so a page that works in Chrome on your laptop has not been tested for iPhone visitors yet.19 Older iPhones that cannot update iOS also keep older Safari versions.29
  • Remove leftover Flash. iPhones never ran Flash.8 Any old Flash video, menu or banner on your site shows nothing on a phone and should be replaced with HTML5 video or images.
  • Set a Home Screen icon. Customers can add your site to their Home Screen, and WebKit announced in 2025 that such sites open as web apps by default.39 An apple-touch-icon image sets the icon your site shows there.15
  • Know what web push requires. On iOS, web notifications work only for sites added to the Home Screen, and only after the user taps something to allow them.34 A site cannot ask on first visit.

Mobile layout also affects search, since Google ranks pages by their mobile version.22 Our guide to websites and SEO covers what each builder lets you control, and how a website works explains the parts behind a page.

See also

References

  1. Apple Reinvents the Phone with iPhone. Apple Newsroom. 2007-01-09. accessed October 22, 2026.
  2. iPhone Premieres This Friday Night at Apple Retail Stores. Apple Newsroom. 2007-06-28. accessed October 22, 2026.
  3. Apple celebrates one billion iPhones. Apple Newsroom. 2016-07-27. accessed October 22, 2026.
  4. Configuring the Viewport. Safari Web Content Guide, Apple Developer Documentation Archive. 2016-12-12. accessed October 22, 2026.
  5. <meta name="viewport">. MDN Web Docs (Mozilla). accessed October 22, 2026.
  6. CSS Viewport Module Level 1 (Editor's Draft). CSS Working Group, W3C. 2026-08-29. accessed October 22, 2026.
  7. Touch Events (W3C Recommendation). Web Events Working Group, W3C. 2013-10-10. accessed October 22, 2026.
  8. Creating Compatible Web Content. Safari Web Content Guide, Apple Developer Documentation Archive. 2016-12-12. accessed October 22, 2026.
  9. Steve Jobs Shares His Thoughts On Flash. Ian Paul, PCWorld. 2010-04-29. accessed October 22, 2026.
  10. Apple's Steve Jobs publishes public 'Thoughts on Flash' letter. AppleInsider. 2010-04-29. accessed October 22, 2026.
  11. Adobe halts Flash Player development for mobile browsers. Mike Rose, Game Developer. 2011-11-09. accessed October 22, 2026.
  12. Adobe Flash Player End of Life. Adobe. accessed October 22, 2026.
  13. iPhone to Support Third-Party Web 2.0 Applications. Apple Newsroom. 2007-06-11. accessed October 22, 2026.
  14. Apple Enhances Revolutionary iPhone with Software Update. Apple Newsroom. 2008-01-15. accessed October 22, 2026.
  15. Configuring Web Applications. Safari Web Content Guide, Apple Developer Documentation Archive. 2016-12-12. accessed October 22, 2026.
  16. iPhone SDK Downloads Top 100,000. Apple Newsroom. 2008-03-12. accessed October 22, 2026.
  17. Apple's App Store opens for business. Philip Elmer-DeWitt, Fortune. 2008-07-10. accessed October 22, 2026.
  18. iPhone App Store Downloads Top 10 Million in First Weekend. Apple Newsroom. 2008-07-14. accessed October 22, 2026.
  19. App Review Guidelines (guidelines 2.5.6 and 4.2). Apple Developer. accessed October 22, 2026.
  20. Responsive Web Design. Ethan Marcotte, A List Apart. 2010-05-25. accessed October 22, 2026.
  21. Mobile and tablet internet usage exceeds desktop for first time worldwide. StatCounter. 2016-11-01. accessed October 22, 2026.
  22. Mobile site and mobile-first indexing best practices. Google Search Central. accessed October 22, 2026.
  23. Desktop vs Mobile vs Tablet Market Share Worldwide (September 2026). StatCounter Global Stats. 2026-09. accessed October 22, 2026.
  24. Desktop vs Mobile vs Tablet Market Share United States of America (September 2026). StatCounter Global Stats. 2026-09. accessed October 22, 2026.
  25. Mobile Operating System Market Share Worldwide (September 2026). StatCounter Global Stats. 2026-09. accessed October 22, 2026.
  26. Mobile Operating System Market Share United States of America (September 2026). StatCounter Global Stats. 2026-09. accessed October 22, 2026.
  27. Mobile Browser Market Share Worldwide (September 2026). StatCounter Global Stats. 2026-09. accessed October 22, 2026.
  28. WebKit. The WebKit Open Source Project. accessed October 22, 2026.
  29. Update to the latest version of Safari. Apple Support. accessed October 22, 2026.
  30. Using alternative browser engines in the European Union. Apple Developer. accessed October 22, 2026.
  31. Using alternative browser engines in Japan. Apple Developer. accessed October 22, 2026.
  32. Apple's Browser Engine Ban Persists, Even Under the DMA. Open Web Advocacy. 2025-07-14. accessed October 22, 2026.
  33. A Blink-powered prototype Chromium browser running on iOS delivers 30% better performance than Safari. GIGAZINE. 2026-06-18. accessed October 22, 2026.
  34. Web Push for Web Apps on iOS and iPadOS. Brady Eidson and Jen Simmons, WebKit blog. 2023-02-16. accessed October 22, 2026.
  35. Apple backtracks on plans to get rid of web apps on iPhones in the EU. Will Shanklin, Engadget. 2024-03-01. accessed October 22, 2026.
  36. Apple says iOS 17.4 won't remove Home Screen web apps in the EU after all. Chance Miller, 9to5Mac. 2024-03-01. accessed October 22, 2026.
  37. SFAddToHomeScreenInfo. Safari Services documentation, Apple Developer. accessed October 22, 2026.
  38. iOS 18.2 lets third-party web browsers add web apps with custom engine in the EU. Filipe Espósito, 9to5Mac. 2024-10-23. accessed October 22, 2026.
  39. News from WWDC25: WebKit in Safari 26 beta. Jen Simmons and others, WebKit blog. 2025-06-09. accessed October 22, 2026.
  40. Update on apps distributed in the European Union. Apple Developer. accessed October 22, 2026.

Web Building Encyclopedia. First published October 22, 2026. Last reviewed October 22, 2026. Every fact on this page is linked to a source we opened. Spotted an error? Write to [email protected].