Steve Jobs introduced the original iPhone in 2007, and while it was a revolutionary device, did not offer easy copy/paste functionality.
Now, nearly 15 years later, Ken Kocienda, a former Apple engineer who worked on the first iPhone, reveal why.
In a tweet, Kocienda explained that I didn’t have time to implement the copy and paste commands well. I was too busy working on the iPhone keyboard, autocorrect, and text system.
Kocienda shared that even the design team didn’t have time to implement it, so this feature was left for later.
The original iPhone didn’t have cut/copy/paste. Infamous! The quickest explanation is that I didn’t have time to do it right. I had a lot of keyboard, autocorrect, and text system work to do. The design team didn’t have time either. So we moved the feature to 1.0.
— Ken Kocienda (@kocienda) June 19, 2022
Finally, Kocienda collaborated with the design team to implement the clipboard feature on the iPhone. He also revealed that the text magnifier, which magnifies the text where the finger is, was his idea.
Kocienda further explains that when a user lifted their finger, the cursor would begin to “shake and move between characters”. To remedy this problem, he created a tap history, which returned the cursor to where it was 200 milliseconds before.