A billion people use iPhones today, the App Store has 500m weekly users, and those users both buy and install far more software than ever before. This model has enabled an explosion of software. You still have to hear about the app - the App Store solves distribution but not discovery - but you don’t have to worry about paying for it and you don’t have to worry what it might do to your computer. But what about a random Vietnamese developer who’s made a fun little game about a bird that flaps? The iOS software model removed trust as a problem, and as an advantage for big companies. Panic, Rogue Amoeba or Basecamp have accumulated reputations that mean they get trust too, for tech insiders who’ve known about them for years. In the past, you knew you could trust Adobe or EA with your credit card, and you knew you could trust them not to abuse your PC too much. If you (or your customers) were technical this didn’t seem like a problem, but for everyone else with 15 copies of the installer in their download folder, baffled at what to do next, this was a huge step forward.Īsking for a credit card to buy an app online created both a friction barrier and a safety barrier - ‘can I trust this company with my card?’ Apple added frictionless, safe payment.Īll of this levelled the playing field. Users don’t have to mess around with installers and file management to put a program onto their computer - they just press ‘Get’. A horoscope app can’t break your computer, or silt it up, or run your battery down, or watch your web browser and steal your bank details.Īn app store is a much better way to distribute software. Putting apps in a sandbox, where they can only do things that Apple allows and cannot ask (or persuade, or trick) the user for permission to do ‘dangerous’ things, means that apps become completely safe. Specifically, Apple tried to solve three kinds of problem: Apple changed how software development worked, and by doing so expanded the number of people who could comfortably, safely use a computer from a few hundred million to a few billion. The multitouch interface is obvious, but the change in the software model was just as important. We all, I think, understand that the iPhone was a generational change in computing, but that change came in two parts.
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