Where would we be without the App Store? In a bit of trouble most likely.
Looking at my iPhone right now I control my banking, entertainment, social life, fitness, and dating from the device I can’t bear to leave in my pocket for more than 20 minutes without checking it. To put it blunt without my apps I’d be a skint, bored, friendless slob with no lady in my life.
I am anyway, but that’s beside the point. Thanks to the App Store I could be something different.
It’s incredible how it’s come on in just seven years, in fact from just 11 hours without it last week following a service outage, Apple lost a reported $25million.
Which is quite staggering, and quite simply suggests, why has it become so popular?
The App Store arrived on our iPhones just a year after the first model touched down and has since seen over 75 billion apps downloaded, and it all began with just 500 apps touching down. No Twitter, no Angry Birds, no Tinder!
Available apps continued to rise from launch and just two months later the number of apps had risen to 3,000 with over one hundred million downloads.
And it looked and felt a little different too, the capabilities have come on leaps and bounds in just under a decade with the iPhone today a much more powerful proposition than before.
In fact, in a world where now we scoff up free apps – over 60% of apps are now free – only 135 apps back then didn’t cost us a penny, and they were all crammed into iTunes rather than separated. That didn’t stop 10 million downloads in the first weekend, with Facebook naturally being the market leader.
Just six months later, the App Store had seen its 500 millionth download, with games beginning to become a prominent part of that.
Of course, the Nokia 6110 kicked off the mobile gaming revolution back in 1997 with Snake, but the App Store and iPhone took that to another level. Beginning with the likes of Super Monkey Ball, which made Sega over $3 million in its first month and is perhaps one of the games which does suggest how much the App Store has changed when it comes down to pricing.
Back in 2008, the game, which was the first to fully make use of the iPhones tilt controls, cost a staggering $9.99. Today it’s just $2.99 and shows exactly how the market has changed. However, with 300,000 downloads in that month, it got gaming off to a roaring start.
The likes of Angry Birds and Flappy Bird have caused huge phenomenon’s over the years with the former spawning TV programmes, millions of dollars’ worth of merchandise, and numerous spin offs of the original game.
That led to major brands getting in on the action too and by 2012 you’d see names such as PokerStars, Football Manager, and Call of Duty welcomed to the fray.
Today you’ll see these regularly featured in the top games charts, a system which helped pave the way for the store’s most popular games in the early days.
The arrival of the top charts quickly solved the problem of visibility with games often falling out of the limelight before they’d even had a chance to shine. When the charts launched, it measured games and apps on the number of downloads rather than revenue, making it the number one way to find games – a method we still use today.
That was, and no pun intended, a game-changer, and made the App Store even more appealing for games developers who could produce quality apps and sell them at a reasonable price in the knowledge that they’ll get seen if they are well-liked.
It’s why you’ll see the likes of the PokerStars mobile app high in the charts, with casino games in particularly benefitting from the App Store. It’s helped contribute to the gambling industry hugely, right from day one, with thousands of punters playing every day.
That’s varied across blackjack, roulette, poker, and backgammon, and whilst that may seem irrelevant, it’s the proof which suggests mobiles are getting closer and closer to our PCs, where once – apart from real casinos of course – the only place to play those games with a decent quality would have been via our desktops.
Of course a lot has moved even further since then, and it’s not just that industry which has reaped rewards. Upon launch, the Bank of America were the only financial institution to release a product in the App Store, today almost every bank in the USA has an app, giving us benefits we often wouldn’t even expect on laptops or PCs.
The same applies with shopping. eBay was one of the founding 500 apps, and is still one of the most downloaded to this day amidst an ocean of other retail apps.
The truth is, we’d be lost without the App Store now. That’s quite clear by the figures recently released by Apple which saw a record $500million spent in the first month of 2015. That was following a record breaking year in which App Store revenue doubled and sales of iPhones surpassed 74 million in the first quarter of the year.
Since 2008, the layout – even switching from iTunes to App Store – has remained fairly constant, the Apple way if you like. And users certainly like that.
It’s been streamlined as time has gone on, even changing the buttons for free apps changing from ‘FREE’ to ‘GET’ in order to not mislead users with the in-app purchases which may be involved.
And that will be carried into a new era of the App Store as the California-based brand begin to make their way into wearables.
The Apple Watch will once again transform the way we use the App Store, and will of course have to be tailored to fit the even tinier screens. Developers have been given four months to create and test their apps, and the devices have already been guaranteed by Tim Cook to have a “ton” of apps.
In just seven years the App Store has grown into a superpower, as well as Apple’s products themselves. The iPhone 6 will likely lead to further changes of the App Store and come this time in another seven years, who knows where we may be with it? One thing’s for sure, it’ll still be here. And it’ll no doubt be bigger than ever before.
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