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15 years of the Android Market: The app that changed the game
(www.androidauthority.com)
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this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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Android
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I mean let's be real here, Android merely copied what Apple was doing at the time. And before I'm lynched by a mob here, Android surpassed Apple quickly in that regard, but it's one of the few times early in the development of the Android ecosystem that they were just following the leader here.
The App Store came before the Play Store, and Google didn't really set itself apart in that arena until many years later when they actually redesigned the store.
... which in itself wasn't anything revolutionary either. The concept of an app store goes all the way back to the early 90s, and even in the smartphone era, there were several app stores on the scene for other mobile platforms before the iPhone was even a thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_store#History
Exactly. I was using online app Stores in 2006 and 2007 to buy, download and install apps on my Windows Mobile phones.
Password managers, device themes, various other apps - you name it, they were all available.
People act like the App Store was some miraculous new thing apple invented, but these existed long before iPhone.
Windows Mobile also had other nice things that iPhone took years to get like copy/paste, GPS navigation, voice control, SD card support (iPhone still doesn't have it), theming etc
The only thing apple did was use a glass screen instead of plastic and made a finger friendly and good looking UI. That's it.
Yes these made the phone more appealing to the average user who only knew flip phones but for us nerds using Windows Mobile, it wasn't a massive step forward.
HTC had already been making finger friendly themes but they could be a little sluggish because the CPU market hadn't really taken off yet.
There was a Russian company that I bought many themes from for my HTC. They were really nice. I just can't remember the name anymore.
Probably 4pda.ru?
But yeah, WinMo was awesome back then. I still miss some of it's features and customisability - no read-only system partition, no SafetyNet crap, physical buttons which could be remapped to anything (AE Button Plus), writing proper scripts using MortScript, modify whichever file you like without any issues. I still remember using this nice Windows XP theme on my HTC Tytn, with the slide-out QWERTY keyboard it really felt like I was using a mini PC.
It's so sad that Android has become so closed now in spite of being technically opensource.
I think it was called SBP Soft I think. But I can't find it even in the wayback machine
Yes I wish Google would let Android be open properly.
I've been an exclusively android user since the original motorola Droid, but I still say you're massively understating the innovation by Apple here
The App Store and Android Market launches were pretty damn close. The iOS app-store launched July 2008 and the first Android consumer device (G1) shipped September 2008 and it had the market from day 1.
Worth noting that iOS users had to wait a full year for the app store after the iPhone 1 launch because Jobs didn't want it at first. I had both devices fairly early on and on the iPhone side we were running "apps" on jailbroken devices months before the app store existed.