Retrospective Round-up: The App Store

The App Store is ten years old. It’s hard to believe that the iPhone launched in 2007 without it, to be honest. When you think of the start of the smartphone revolution, you think of apps. “There’s an app for that” was such a ubiquitous slogan that you heard it everywhere in those days. When it launched in 2008, the App Store redefined what, exactly, a smartphone could do. With that said, let’s take a look back in time and round up the ways the App Store shaped the modern smartphone market.

Attack of the Clones

The first and most obvious impact of the fantastically popular App Store is the legion of clones it inspired. Of them, the Google Play Store is the most notable and the only other successful platform from the era. Truth be told, the success of the iPhone can be largely attributed to support from app developers. Blackberry’s decline can be certainly chalked up to the lack of support from those same developers.

Gaming

The App Store reshaped handheld gaming. Where Nintendo and Sony were battling with their traditional handheld gaming consoles, Apple did something unthinkable. Something that Nokia had tried a few years prior with the N-Gage. They made smartphones gaming devices. Nintendo hasn’t been muscled out of the gaming space, but they also couldn’t exactly push Apple out either. It’s impossible to fight just how big of an install base that smartphones have as a gaming platform. Nearly every adult has a smartphone; the same can’t be said of Nintendo’s 3DS.

The impact of the app store on gaming is nearly immeasurable: the early 2010s were marked by a flood of “freemium” games. Games that would have previously found no audience could now reach a large demographic. Since they were free to start, these games could get into your device, and your head, easily. Then, once you were invested, you would spend a few bucks here and there on power-ups. This business model proved insanely lucrative and persists to this day. Thankfully, traditional game design is still alive and well in the core market.

Phones Became Omnitools

Before the App Store, phones were phones. After its launch, phones were damn near everything. Some apps make your phone a GPS, while others make it a video streaming device. Other apps might make your phone a banking portal, while others make it a music playback device. Nearly any functionality you could imagine was suddenly rolled into your phone. And all of that is thanks to this one software platform. It’s been a long decade, and a lot has changed. But here’s to the next ten years, and the changes they bring.