App History on Android
The term ‘app’ has been around for a long time. An app (or application) and a software program are the same thing. Thanks to Apple, though, the word has been adopted by the mobile world, and means either a smartphone app or a tablet app.
This wonderful app ecosystem almost didn’t happen at all, according to Walter Isaac son, the biographer of the famed Steve Jobs. When Apple was developing the iPhone, Jobs was initially not too enamored with the idea that third-party developers should be able to create software to run directly on his beautiful, sleek device – and potentially mess it up. Instead, he wanted developers to create Web apps that could be used through the device’s mobile Safari Web browser.
Luckily Steve’s preference didn’t prevail, otherwise the multi billion-dollar app economy might have evolved very differently.
The challenges with Web apps are numerous, from ensuring compatibility with mobile Web browsers and all their different versions – which involves a lot of testing – to complexities around mobile Web browsers being able to reliably access sensors (such as the microphone, compass or accelerator) on your phone, and all the way through to how fast the Web app will run if it hasn’t been designed to run specifically on your phone. Facebook famously tried to pursue Web apps, only to have CEO Mark Zuckerberg do an about-turn in 2012, stating that it was his ‘single biggest mistake’,24 due to those same complexity and performance issues inherent in Web apps.
If it hadn’t been for Apple Board member Art Levinson petitioning Jobs, the platform might never have been opened up. ‘I called him half a dozen times to lobby for the potential of the apps’, but Jobs was against them, says Levinson, ‘partly because he felt his team did not have the bandwidth to figure out all the complexities that would be involved in policing third-party app developers.’25 It was definitely a valid point: Apple does check every single app submitted to the App Store before it’s released to the public, which has a certain cost and overheads associated with it.
In July 2008, the App Store was finally launched to the public. Among the first apps were the New York Times news app, BeeJiveIM (one of the first mobile instant messengers), games such as Crash Bandicoot, Rolando and – one that I loved – PhoneSaber, an app that would make a light-sabre noise every time you waved around your phone. Needless to say, a lot of progress has been made since.