Mobile phone technology is growing at an exponential rate, and this doesn’t seem to be decelerating any time soon. In the year 2012, less than 5 years since Apple launched its online App Store, over 25 billion mobile phone applications (apps) were downloaded globally. It is predicted that over 44 million apps will have been downloaded by the year 2016 – these numbers in this lucrative market are almost too large to comprehend.
In the early days, the default apps started out as simply maps, photos, texts and weather. They were very basic and were limited in terms of functionality, but they did the job for what we thought we needed. It was like having a personal planner in the palm of your hand, hence why smartphones were initially marketed towards businessmen who were constantly on the go.
Then gaming apps started to dominate the market, from simple, always-lovable Tetris-style games to one of the most downloaded apps in the industry’s relatively short history: Angry Birds, which has exceeded 1 billion to this day. This came along with the pointless but fun for a short time apps like ‘pretend shotgun’, ‘pretend razor’ and ‘cat mimics what you say’ (these are clearly not the correct names).
After this came the essential and highly functional apps that many of us can’t now live without i.e. social media programs, advanced camera technology packages and music apps that allow us to store thousands upon thousands of songs on our tiny device.
