The history of the iPhone development by Apple Inc. spans from the early 2000s to about 2010. The first iPhone was released in 2007. By the end of 2009, iPhone models had been released in all major markets.
The idea of an Apple phone came from Jean-Marie Hullot, a software engineer from NextStep, and later, MacOS. Initially, making an Apple phone was not favored by CEO Steve Jobs, but eventually Hullot was able to convince him. The first team was created in Paris; however, it was not until a few years later that he took the project more seriously: the French engineers were asked to work back in the US, but Hullot declined and resigned from Apple with his team. Another engineer, Henri Lamiraux, became the new head of the project with Scott Forstall, to develop the iPhone software.
Initially, the iPhone started from a conflict between Steve Jobs and his brother-in-law working at Microsoft, then convinced by a French high-level engineer, Jean-Marie Hullot, working for Apple France to do so. The project within Apple Inc. for developing the iPhone began with a request in 2004 from CEO Steve Jobs to the company's hardware engineer Tony Fadell, software engineer Scott Forstall and design engineer Sir Jonathan Ive to work on the highly confidential "Project Purple."
While pitting two teams of engineers led by Fadell and Forstall, Jobs decided to investigate the use of touchscreen devices and tablet computers (which later came to fruition with the iPad). Jobs ended up pushing for a touch-screen device that many have noted has similarities to Apple's previous touch-screen portable device, the Newton MessagePad. Like the MessagePad, the iPhone is nearly all screen. Its form factor is credited to Apple's Chief Design Officer, Jonathan Ive.
Jobs expressed his belief that tablet PCs and traditional PDAs were not good choices as high-demand markets for Apple to enter, despite receiving many requests for Apple to create another PDA. In 2002, after the iPod launched, Jobs realized that the overlap of mobile phones and music players would force Apple to get into the mobile phone business.