Apps evolution
I’m referring to the mobile applications specifically, because people tend to use them all the time in everyday life. We use the terms apps and app phones to describe applications and smartphones. Applications are designed to work on smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices but each one of them has a different distributer depending on their brand. We have Amazon store that is used often instead of Android app store which was opened in March 2011 and since then it has 3800 apps. Of course Apple’s app store for iOS which was the first app service and was opened in July 2008 and since then it has over 10 billion downloads. Blackberry world is the app store for Blackberry OS and Blackberry 10. It opened in April 2009 and has over 120.000 apps till today. Google play or else Android market is the store for android devices that opened in October 2008 and since then it has 40 billion apps downloaded. Nokia store opened in May 2009 and in February 2011 it announced that it would start using Windows Phone as its basic operating system and then in October 2011, Ovi became Nokia store. Windows phone store opened in October 2010 by Microsoft for Windows phone platforms and it has over 120.000 apps. Last but not least, Samsung apps store was launched in September 2009 and it reached 10 million downloads.
Some apps are free and some other must be bought but the most popular ones are the free ones like Gmail, YouTube, Google maps and Facebook. The ones that I’m really interested in though are apps like WhatsApp messenger, Viber, Skype, Line, Facebook messenger etc. because they keep you in contact with people all over the world, only by identifying users by their contact numbers. They are all available to every app store and you can download them all for free except WhatsApp for which you have to pay 0,99$ after the first year of use if you are an iOS user. All these apps are cross platform instant messaging and calling apps for your smartphone. WhatsApp and Facebook messenger replaced sms and Skype, Viber and Line replaced international calls. Now we can text, send photos, videos and audio and also we can call and video call with no charges as long as we have internet conection, WiFi or 3G. These apps are revolutionizing the way people communicate with each other. Nowadays, people even do interviews and conferences through Skype. They can be considered as a social experience that combines communication and gaming, thanks to all emoticons and the media you can send in a single or a group conversation. You can go back to whatever date you want and read or delete the conversations, the photos, the audio or whatever you sent or received. Also they have sufficient privacy so that user’s info and data remain private.
Sms and calls will soon meet their maker. Interaction between people through the phone is not going to be the same anymore. Technology evolves very quickly and we tend to follow it and forget what was going on before. The next generations won’t probably meet sms and the “classic” way of calling. Everything is going to be based on internet and mobile and desktop apps.
That’s the future!
