Scott Forstall

Scott James Forstall (born August 28, 1969) is an American software engineer, known for leading the original software development team for the iPhone and iPad. Having spent his career first at NeXT and then Apple, he was the senior vice president (SVP) of iOS Software at Apple Inc. from 2007 until October 2012.

After leaving Apple, Forstall has been a Broadway producer known for co-producing the Tony Award-winning Fun Home and Eclipsed with his wife Molly Forstall, among others.

Forstall grew up in Kitsap County, Washington, the second-born of three boys to a registered-nurse mother Jeanne and an engineer father Tom Forstall. His older brother Bruce is also a senior software design engineer, at Microsoft.

A gifted student for whom skills such as programming "came easily where they were difficult for others", Forstall qualified for advanced-placement science and math class in junior high school, and gained experience programming on Apple IIe computers.

He was skipped forward a year, entering Olympic High School in Bremerton, Washington, early where classmates recall his immersion in competitive chess, history, and general knowledge, on occasion competing at the state level. He achieved a 4.0 GPA and earned the position of valedictorian, a position he shared with a classmate, Molly Brown, who would later become his wife. He had established the goal of being a "designer of high-tech electronics equipment", as he proclaimed in an interview with a local newspaper.

Enrolling at Stanford University, he graduated in 1991 with a degree in symbolic systems. The next year he received his master's degree in computer science, also from Stanford. During his time at Stanford, Forstall was a member of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity.

Forstall joined Steve Jobs's NeXT in 1992 and stayed when it was purchased by Apple in 1997. Forstall was then placed in charge of designing user interfaces for a reinvigorated Macintosh line. In 2000, Forstall became a leading designer of the Mac's new Aqua user interface, known for its water-themed visual cues such as translucent icons and reflections, making him a rising star in the company. He was promoted to SVP in January 2003. During this period, he supervised the creation of the Safari web browser. Lisa Melton, a senior developer on the Safari team, credited Forstall for being willing to trust the instincts of his team and respecting their ability to develop the browser in secret.

In 2005, when Jobs began planning the iPhone, he had a choice to either "shrink the Mac, which would be an epic feat of engineering, or enlarge the iPod". Jobs favored the former approach but pitted the Macintosh and the iPod team, led by Forstall and Tony Fadell respectively, against each other in an internal competition. Forstall won that fierce competition to create iOS. The decision enabled the success of the iPhone as a platform for third-party developers: using a well-known desktop operating system as its basis allowed the many third-party Mac developers to write software for the iPhone with minimal retraining. Forstall was also responsible for creating a software developer's kit for programmers to build iPhone apps, as well as an App Store within iTunes.