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Comment by wayneftw | Hacker News Reader

> The Windows app store...

Thank you for saying "app store" instead of "App Store". If you dictate this sentence on an iPhone it comes out as "The windows App Store".

In other words, the people that work for Apple are so petty that they won't capitalize the word "windows" even if it was preceded by the word "Microsoft" but they always capitalize the words "App Store" because they insist that they have a trademark on this very generic term even though they really don't [0].

According to them, the generic phrase for app store is "online store" [1], which is hilarious because nobody ever says that.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_store#%22App_Store%22_trad...

[1] https://www.apple.com/legal/intellectual-property/trademark/...

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> they won't capitalize the word "windows" even if it was preceded by the word "Microsoft"

Typing Microsoft Windows from my iPhone. It does capitalize it properly...

Yup, iOS I believe learns your typings over time and chooses what you use the most. So if you talk about Windows a lot and capitalize it, it will start suggesting it, but if you talk about your house windows more, it'll lowercase it.

Yeah, but not when you dictate the same sentence.

My main complaint is that they insist that they own "app store" when the courts already told them that they don't.

> the people that work for Apple are so petty

Hyperbole. It's much more likely no one at Apple cares about this like you do, and it's just a simple bug; nothing malicious.

And we'll never know which it was... Which is the deeper point.

Never attribute to malice what can just as easily be attributed to incompetence (or convenient indifference, as the case may be).

Yeah sure. I suppose you’d also say that it’s simply incompetence that Apple refuses to open Google Maps, the most widely used map app, when I click on a link to somebody’s address in my contacts app. Oh and it just so happens that I can’t replace the Contacts app either.

It’s nothing less than pure spiteful pettiness.

What was the earliest prior art resembling the Apple App Store? (Eg curation, 3rd party publishing with royalty cuts, one-click install.)

Was it Steam? Which first launched in 2003?

Did Apple debut objectively novel behavior that made the App Store a thing? Perhaps the install flow, or maybe the developer submission flow? (Which was admittedly awful for a number of years)

Symbian had mandatory signature checks and Nokia Signed/Symbian Signed program for privileged APIs, i-mode phones had “carrier official sites” program and Java app players to use with...

That said, the idea of iOS and App Store that you don’t ever sideload, browse from PC or web browser, or handle .ipa directly, as an integrated whole, do feel novel to me.

Something similar but for music existed in pre-Vivendi MP3.com (whose founder later started Lindows which had an app store for Linux PCs in 2002), and a real world analog might be something like a consignment store.

App Store was obvious as Linux user. In Windows and Symbian users has to search for installer. Out of commercial looks like Valve was first. I've never seen Windows Marketplace. Nokia took so long to make obvious thing - you have to review and sign application by Nokia (Symbian 9.1, 2005 [0]), but host by yourself.

Valve Steam - announced on March 22, 2002, released for beta testing the same day. [1]

Windows Marketplace - announced on July 12, 2004, launched on October 12, 2004 [2].

Nokia Ovi - announced on 29 August 2007, public beta on 28 August 2008 [3].

iPhone App Store - opened on July 10, 2008 [4].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_(service)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Marketplace

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovi_(Nokia)

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(iOS)

How could you forget the first? Brew!

Sept 2001 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_Runtime_Environment_for...

"an application development platform created by Qualcomm, originally for code division multiple access (CDMA) mobile phones, featuring third-party applications such as mobile games. It is offered in some feature phones (mostly with the similar specifications of a mid to high-end mobile phones) but not in smartphones. Developed in 1999, as a platform for wireless applications on CDMA-based mobile phones, it debuted in September 2001."

Wow, code signing. Not much CDMA in my country, J2ME here. Why limit to manufacturer? Third party store is even cooler, found one portal [1]:

> Downloads:

> Since Mar.31, 2004: 4,189,079

> Last week: 209,952

Possible trace:

> On-Device Portal technology emerged in 2000 [2]

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20050429230232/http://www.getjar....

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-Device_Portal

Wow, I completely forgot about this one. I remember this on my flip phone. While a nice bit of nostalgia, IIRC the fees and royalties were very high and the administration to get something submitted was not in the same ballpark of the earliest Apple App Store.

Wikipedia lists PocketGear from 1999: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_app_distributio...

If you drop the money a BBS is an old-man's appstore.

Isn't app store just a package repository with added friction? Wouldn't something like the BSD ports tree or slackware be earliest?

Click and run was an app store in 2002.

I get

Microsoft windows app store

on my Google.

using google's keyboard, i get "Microsoft Windows app store"

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