5 Years of the App Store

In a bar and want to order a drink? There’s an app for that.
Need to find out train times in a hurry? There’s an app for that.
Stranded on an island with only penguins for company and need foraging tips? There’s probably still an app for that.

The existence of the app store over the last 5 years, has caused one of the biggest changes in how mobile technology is used.

The iPhone app store was released July 10^th 2008 alongside the iPhone 3G, this opened the door, for users to download software created by third party developers for use on their phones.

Now if a user wanted to use their phone as a torch, or find the closest bar, the answer was just a click away. Then if the app wasn’t what they wanted they could then just delete it just as easily.

With the massive success of the iPhone app store, Apple’s competitors were quick to release their own versions. Android’s Google Play store and BlackBerry’s App World being the most prominent back then. The irony however is that a 3^rd party app store hadn’t originally been planned for the iPhone.

In 2007 in the wake of the iPhone’s release, Steve Jobs announced that web apps were the future, web apps that run within apple’s browser safari. This news was something of a disappointment to developers, and thus led to the jail breaking community being formed.

It was through this community that the full capabilities of the iPhone was brought to light, to a point even apple took note. They released the iPhone OS Software development Kit to the public in March 2008.

To give some idea of how popular the app store was after its release, it reached 10 million downloads after its first weekend. If that wasn’t mind blowing enough it hit 100 million by September 9^th that year. As it stands there are now 900,000 apps in the App store, that number is constantly growing.

To Quote Saara Bergstrom from Rovio: the company that shot up from a small gaming company to a multi-million dollar company through Angry Bird’s success on the app store.

“The App Store was a game changer for the whole mobile industry. It made independent publishing mainstream for developers and apps easily available for consumers”

We couldn’t agree with that more, so here’s to 5 years of the App Store, we’re excited to see what surprises the future 5 years down the line has to offer.

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