In what sense? Testing my memory here, but it let you install stuff from various developers. Cydia cranked things up several notches (thanks for that, by the way), but are they both not "stores"?
I guess, to me, the defining characteristic of a "store" is that you can buy things at a store... it just feels awkward to say that a store is just a place that has things and lets you get them on request ;P.
AppTapp Installer was merely a package manager, and they did not implement any store functionality. FWIW, in Cydia's case, I didn't launch "Cydia Store" until about a year after I launched "Cydia Installer".
(AppTapp also wasn't the first package manager for the iPhone, but maybe it was the first one on-device? The one I had used involved USB and some web page I think, but I am forgetting the name.)
>A place where items may be accumulated or routinely kept.
Didn't installer.app come configured for repositories of software you could install? I seem to remember one of the first things people installed was an app that gave you extra repos to choose from
Cydia was awesome. As a kid, the porting of apt and dpkg to ios was what got me into linux and debian, having only had access to an ipod touch before. Thank you for your work, it is inspiring.