History of mobile app development

Don’t we just love mobile apps? Well, these applications that have become a part of our daily lives have an interesting history and may not be known by many. For many of you, the development of mobile applications dates back to a few years ago with the iPhone app development. However, app development can go back a few years earlier, when Blackberry first delivered wireless email in 2002 by RIM. Since then, the world of application development has advanced by leaps and bounds as you will see below.

The app development journey

We cannot ignore the great push that Apple has given with its iTunes marketplace. We can say that this was really the first time that mobile phone users were able to take full advantage of mobile applications. A year after Apple released its first iPhone that had pre-loaded apps, they launched their App Store in 2008 and this wowed smartphone users. The same year, in October, Google launched its Android Market with HTC Dream, which was the first commercially available Android smartphone.

By April 2009, the number of apps downloaded from Apple’s app store had surpassed one billion, which was incredible considering the app store had only been around for eight months. As of September 2011, this number had increased tenfold with over 10 billion downloads. Android has also proven to be a major competitor in application development, and as of April 2010, the total number of applications downloaded from the Android Market exceeded one billion. Just one year later, in January 2011, total app downloads also passed the 10 billion mark. As of March 2012, the App Store enjoyed over 25 billion downloads and although Android Market was later switched to Google Play, it also did very well with over 15 billion downloads as of May of last year.

Most popular apps

We cannot talk about the history of mobile applications and fail to recognize some of the most downloaded applications in the history of apps.

The first paid Android app to hit the 1 billion mark was ‘beautiful widgets’ and this was in 2011. In 2012, we saw ‘drawsomething’ receive 50 million downloads in just 50 days after it was released. ‘Instagram’ also received 38 million new downloads in just 3 months from its 12 million downloads in January 2012 to more than 50 million in April of that same year. ‘Angry birds’, the most popular mobile game, also had more than one billion global downloads in May last year.

The future of apps

Currently, around 70% of iPhone users have downloaded apps from popular brands, while 60% say they are interested in doing the same. According to research by Indiana University, people are more interested in downloading apps from a brand they recognize, and this could mean good news for your business.

Both smartphone and tablet users have different needs when it comes to apps and it is easy to see why the app development industry has a great future. What many of you don’t know is that app usage is actually higher than mobile web usage and while initially the business world took more advantage of mobile apps, things have changed and apps have revolutionized the how our needs are met. Internet access is now easy and statistics indicate that half of the cell phone market is dominated by smartphones. So this means that there is a growing demand for apps and app development is now found on virtually every operating system. You, too, could tap into the enormous potential that mobile apps bring to us by talking to a mobile app development company.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *