Happy 5th Birthday App Store

Today marks the 5th Birthday of the Apple App Store and a dramatic change to the way we all buy software. To celebrate apple is giving away some very popular apps.

A short definition
App is simply a shortened form of the word application. We use to refer to them as programs when we used them on a computer.

A short history
We have had applications for a long long time. They use to come on CDs and before that floppy disks. The iPhone had apps before there was an app store; everything that was loaded on the phone was an app. But, after jailbreakers created a way to put there own apps on the iPhone Apple realized there was tremendous revenue potential in creating an official App Store.

Long before the advent of the iPhone we in the handheld computing world were using the term app. I remember while I was a Mormon missionary in Pennsylvania in 2009 a kid we were teaching asked me if I knew about apps. Of course I knew about apps I said, I had been using apps on a Palm Pilot since I was 13 years old. Missionaries are a very focused group of people and I had no idea what was going on In the world of iPhone and ultimately the world of electronics.

A discussion of change
Things have changed phenomenally in the last 5 years, not just for the iPhone but for software overall.

What we use to do

• We use to go to a physical store like Best Buy or, try to remember, Circuit City 
• Options for each type of application were few to none
• lay down 50 bucks or more every time we got an application
• every time a new version of that application came out we had to go back to the store and shell out the money again
• We expected those applications to be perfect that they would run without coding problems

What we do now

• We open up an app store on whatever device or computer we have, never leaving our home
• There are hundreds or thousands of options in each category for a mobile device, and dozens of options on a computer
• We would like our apps free if possible, if that does not happen we would really like to pay no more than a dollar or two for the software
• When a new version of an app is released we expect it to be handed to us, via an update, for free
• We expected that applications, especially new ones, will have bugs in them and that these will be addressed frequently by updates

Do you see the way the world has changed because of the App Store? When Apple started doing it mainstream everybody had to jump on board, and as a result they changed not only the phone industry, but the whole electronics industry. 

Please leave your comments about how you think the App Store has changed things.

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Thanks for reading, and remember, live better.