---
title: "Which came first, the iPhone or Java?"
description: "the iPhone vs Java: Java came first, by 12 years — 1995 against 2007. What happened in each case, and why the dates are often given differently."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/iphone-vs-java/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, the iPhone or Java?

**Which came first, the iPhone or Java?: Java**

1995 — 12 years before the iPhone

Java came first, by 12 years. Sun Microsystems announced Java publicly.

## Side by side

|  | the iPhone | Java |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 2007 | 1995 |
| Date | 2007-06-29 | 1995-05-23 |
| Category | technology | technology |
| What happened | The first iPhone went on sale after a January announcement. | Sun Microsystems announced Java publicly. |

## the iPhone

Announced on 9 January 2007 and on sale from 29 June, the first iPhone had no app store, no copy and paste, no 3G and no video recording. The App Store arrived over a year later in July 2008. Android Inc. had been founded in 2003, four years before the iPhone, but the first Android phone shipped fifteen months after it.

## Java

Java was announced in May 1995, having started in 1991 as a project called Oak aimed at interactive television — a market that did not exist yet. Its promise was "write once, run anywhere", achieved by compiling to bytecode for a virtual machine rather than to a specific processor. JavaScript arrived seven months later and was named after it purely as a marketing decision; the two languages are unrelated.

## Common questions

### Which came first, the iPhone or Java?

Java, by 12 years — 1995 against 2007.

### When did the iPhone start?

2007. The first iPhone went on sale after a January announcement.

### When did Java start?

1995. Sun Microsystems announced Java publicly.

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## Sources

- Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (https://www.wikidata.org/) [CC0 1.0]