Android and Iphones, the two giants of the phone industry where there are over millions of apps on each store.
The history of mobile applications can be traced back to 1994 when IBM designed the first ever smartphone which included preloaded features like a calculator, world clock, calendar and a contact book. Over the years, the BlackBerry and Apple’s Iphone have revolutionized the mobile app industry to new revenue generated heights. Today we can find and download apps for any category which includes games, travel, banking, and music.
Anthony Taylor is a recent graduate of computer science at Western University who developed the popular London app, OnTime which helps and tracks your bus routes. Anthony describes the process of coding a phone application, ” The two main ones out there are Android and IOS, so you would have to sign up for profile developer, so to start you would use Xcode for IOS, or Android Studios for Android to write the code, and then choose your language. On IOS, It’s either swift or objective c, and on Android it’s Javascript. Once you figure it out, you just gotta lay out the functionality to get started”.
A topic of concern for most phone app developers is to have a priced version to make money or have a free version that can be littered with adds. Jamie- O-Toole is a Fanshawe alumni grad who developed bus transit apps in London, Kitchener, Toronto and New York who now works in the mobile sector at TD Bank, and he explains why free is the way to go, ” Free model is good because people will download things. People are very fickle when you can download something with your thumb and uninstall it with your thumb in the matter of 30 seconds. You are definitely going to lose someone when your app is $2.50. Especially, when you are buying something on the app store, they are going to want you to have your credit card on there and sometimes people just don’t wanna do that. To get more users, it’s definitely better to get more users with the free model”.
The future of App developing continues to be a strong industry for people to join. Most people have smart phones and iPhones today, so apps are easy to access and simply make your life better as a result. There are millions of mobile apps in both Android and IOS with the app market seeing the revenue of more than $30 billion yearly and still growing. The year of 2014 witnessed over 138 million app downloads in a single year, with an estimation of downloads reaching 268 million by the year 2017.
