The conventional wisdow that had to be abandoned was that a phone was a brick that you had in your pocket and that did text messages and phone calls, instead of it being a computer that you might sometimes use for text messages and phone calls.
I remember writing apps for the iPhone and the biggest hurdle to getting it submitted was sizing the screens for the display variants.
There would have been no chance of developing an app for the Nokia ecosystem with all the different screen sizes your app would have to support.
Even downloading an app or ringtone required going through all these scammy websites and you had to enter your exact Exact model number and pay somehow…then they would text you a link or something.
Apple really cleaned up the ecosystem with the App Store. It made apps safe to download.
I think the true breakthrough was actually the iPod; the true "first" Apple phone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_ROKR#E1 was a flop, partly because they allowed the various collaboration partners to hamstring its features. The iPhone took everything in-house.
> Even downloading an app or ringtone required going through all these scammy websites and you had to enter your exact Exact model number and pay somehow…then they would text you a link or something.
> Apple really cleaned up the ecosystem with the App Store. It made apps safe to download.
Correct. People (rightly) hate on the restrictive and profiteering nature of the App Store, but the telcos were even worse.
The now-hotly-debated 30% cut was seen as a reprieve from telco distribution and brick-and-mortar, where the retailer was taking 60-70% of the purchase price.
This is still better than when Qualcomm was hawking their mobile Java BREW platform around the turn of the century. We had a mid-tier brewery interested in trying a product locator but Qualcomm wasn’t willing to budge on terms which included a percentage of their total gross revenue – they were still insisting on seeing tax filings up until we walked away!
You’ll have to excuse me if I can’t manage a tear for them.
The things that developers want is often orthogonal to what end users want.
1. End users have never said “it would be great to have PWAs so we can have the same lowest common denominator for our phones that we have with electron apps on the desktop”
2. End users have never said “we really want a ‘relationship’ with the developer so they can spam us with related offers”
3. “I feel so bad that Epic and other companies who spam the App Store could get 30% more for selling loot boxes and gems for pay to win games” - this is where 90% of App Store revenue comes from. It came out in the epic trial