Mobile Foundations Let’s get geeky for a moment

1 The number of s people spent a whopping $25 billion on apps – an increase of 62 per cent on the previous year.3 In the face of these eye-watering statistics, it seems bizarre to think that sazing to think that apps (just a cuter word for ‘applications’) appeared only a year later in 2008 – launched on Apple’s rather revolutionary iPhone. So why is the mobile sector growing so fast? And why have both the rollout and the usage of the mobile Internet grown so much faster than the desktop Internet MD payday loans? In this section I’ll dive into how the last few decades of innovation have converged to deliver history’s most powerful computers, in the smallest forms, and at a price that an increasing proportion of the world’s population is able to afford.

We’ll cover everything, from the operating systems used by the two smartphone giants Google and Apple, to the most popular activities on smartphones, to the underlying technologies that make apps so powerful

Mobile technology didn’t become huge overnight. It was a long time in the making – it was just that most of us didn’t notice (and frankly didn’t care that much). Think about this for a second: the smartphone in your pocket today is about 15 times faster than a Cray-1 supercomputer (1979 vintage), and as powerful as the most powerful computer in the world in 1987.4 But it’s not just about the hardware. A Cray-1 couldn’t make phone calls, or

tell you where in the world you were standing, or tell which direction was north, or even allow you to read your email. All it offered you was a keyboard and a screen – and the ability to perform millions of calculations per second. Before computers became mainstream they needed to address a number of issues. They needed to be friendlier to use – the only way you could communicate with them was by a command line interface and complex instruction sets. The advent of the GUI (Graphical User Interface) and its rapid adoption in the 1980s was a huge step forward. The mouse, even though it first appeared in the 1960s, only really gained broader traction in the 1970s and 80s. But the market was still fragmented with IBM, Commodore, Atari and Apple all creating competing hardware, and softwareputer mice, printers and other peripherals didn’t play well together. It was Microsoft who pioneered a huge change in the mid-1980s with the arrival of Windows. Windows was a new operating system – or OS (we’ll use that term from now on). An OS is simply a big chunk of software that is the glue of any computer: it manages all the hardware on the computer (such as the keyboard, screen and processor) and manages all the other programs that run on the computer (such as email, the Web browser, your calendar). Windows exploded in popularity because it was simple to use and provided a visual interface, and banished the command-line interface to the annals of history. The Windows OS was launched in November 1985 and in just three years it was running on 25 per cent of all computers. In addition to making computers more accessible to users, it also provided a powerful platform for developers. As Windows dominated more and more desktop computers – it ended up running on 96 per cent of the world’s computers from 1998 to 2005 – developers could write a software program, and then easily distribute it and have it run on all those computers (no matter who manufactured the actual hardware). With the Windows OS now managing the complex interface of dealing with any type of computer hardware, software developers were left with the much easier – and interesting – task of building software that could do cool things such as browse the Web, manage your email, generate visual maps and play games. Over the course of 20 years, the Windows OS allowed hundreds of millions of people to learn to use computers, and millions of developers to create ins that would generate billions of dollars of value.