Rise of the Mobile App Store and Mobile App Development

Earlier this year, Apple’s App Store reached its 10 billionth web application download goal. What is amazing is that they did this in about 30 months’ time. Apple’s first iPhone was released to the US market at the end of June in 2007. At the time, the smartphone was seen as a huge leap forward in innovation. Users were able to interact with this new device in ways that they never could using just a cell phone on a wireless carrier. This was more than a phone – this was the beginning of the mobile web.

When the iPhone was released, Apple announced that the iPhone would support third-party web applications written in Ajax (asynchronous Javascript and XML) so long as the apps maintained the look and feel of the iPhone interface.  In March 2008, Apple released a software development kit to third-party developers and a slough of developers set out to create native applications for Apple mobile devices.

Apple’s App Store opened for business on July 11, 2008. The apps that were offered in the beginning were primarily Apple developed educational programs, mobile commerce and business productivity tools.  There was no Angry Birds, Bejeweled, or my personal favorite, Flick Fishing.  Games hadn’t really come along yet – they came along later and have proved to be “crazy popular” with users–dominating all app store categories over the last two years.

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Mark Lowenstein recently wrote about LBS and the proliferation of GPS enabled or capable mobile devices. One of the things that I learned from the article is that we are reaching mass market penetration in terms of vehicular GPS devices. This coupled with the mobile phone environment (trending toward ubiquitous GPS capabilities) puts users in an ever localized and networked environment. Did someone say electro/metropolis?

At this time, being someone who feels like they are generally well informed in terms of applications currently available, I would have to agree with Lowenstein in his prediction that there is and perhaps will not be a large market for subscription-based LBS. I think there are many reasons for this, but perhaps the most obvious one has to do with the proliferation of non-mobile internet access (especially in the U.S. market). Compounded with increased mobile Read more…