History of the App Store

Hey guys it’s Greg with Apple Explained, and as you can see from the title, History of the App Store won this week’s voting poll. Now I’m glad this topic won because 2018 is the ten year anniversary of the App Store and that means if you’re in middle school right now, you probably don’t remember what life was like before the app era. So let’s travel back to 2007, the year of the original iPhone, and explore how people used their smartphones without an app store.

Back then, when you purchased a smartphone, whether it was a Blackberry, iPhone, or Nokia, you were stuck with the software included on the phone. If you wanted to use Facebook, you had to go through the smartphone’s web browser and get on Facebooks website. And because you were accessing the site on a mobile device, you were served the mobile site version. And the problem with this was most mobile sites were half-baked versions of the full website. So you typically didn’t have access to all its features and functionality, and if you did manage to access the full desktop site from a mobile device, it was slow, clumsy to navigate, and hard on your battery.

So right away you can see the need for an app store. But things always appear more obvious in retrospect.