“One
of the most convincing arguments from the voting floor was from a woman who
said that even her grandmother had heard of it”, said Ben Zimmer of American Dialect Society.
He was explaining the reasons behind the decision of the 128-year-old organisation to choose the word ‘App’ as the word of the year
for 2010. It was two years earlier in 2008 that Apple launched iOS App store
which allowed third-party mobile app development and distribution. This freeing
up of the App market led to an explosion
of new and innovative apps and became part of the lexicon of mobile device
users.
1980s
Mass consumption of mobile apps began in the late 2000s with the arrival
of app distribution services but the history of mobile app development lies
further in the past. In the 1980s,
British company Psion launched series of pocket computers called Psion Organizer.
The second model of the PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) featured apps like
file manager, password protection applications as well as puzzle and adventure
games. Later it launched EPOC operating system with Backronym Electronic Piece
of Cheese, which fueled more sophisticated apps like spreadsheets and word processors.
1990s
Often called the world’s
first smartphone IBM Simon featured applications like e-mail, address book, calculator, and calendar which were focused on
productivity. As processors became faster and memory devices became cheaper,
new innovations filtered through. In 1998, EPOC became Symbian which was a
joint venture owned by Nokia, Psion, Ericsson,
and Motorola. Symbian OS was widely used by Nokia, Samsung, LG and Ericsson
albeit with different platforms and APIs.
Concurrently, another company Palm released Palm Pilot in 1996 with
features like touchscreen and data synchronisation
which are now ubiquitous in contemporary smartphones.
2000s
In 2007, Apple launched its first iPhone which operated on the iOS operating system. A few months later, a Korean company HTC launched the first
smartphone operating on the Android
operating system developed by Internet giant Google. Both the platforms offered
a marketplace for apps where users were free to install both paid and free apps
for their smartphones. Apple’s
App Store and Google’s
Android Market (now named Google Play), as well
as multi-touch screens, revolutionised
the mobile app development eco-system. Microsoft also jumped on the bandwagon with Windows OS which was
adopted by Nokia over its own Symbian OS.
2010s- Present
Both Android and iOS platforms hit a billion installations milestone in
2009-10 and in 2011, app usage surpassed mobile web usage. The convenience of the mobile phone gave mobile app development an edge over desktop
software and it is increasingly preferred over mobile web.
2014 arrived with wearable tech through Apple Watch, Google Glass, and Android Wear. These devices could
use haptic technology for niche utilities like fitness trackers and navigation
tools and connect with smartphones for mail notifications.
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