By Conor O'Neill | February 2, 2009
Nice piece by John Collins in The Irish Times Innovation magazine today about the iPhone App Store and Android. Quotes from Conor, Pat Phelan and Steve Troughton-Smith.
“An awful lot of developers had no route to market before the App Store came along,†says Conor O’Neill, software industry veteran and managing director of online review site LouderVoice. He cites the case of Steven Troughton-Smith, a 20-year-old Irish student who has sold thousands of copies of his iPhone applications. In the first six days it was available, Speed, an application that shows how fast you’re travelling, was downloaded 36,000 times. The application was free at that time, but now sells for €0.79.
“If someone like that had tried to set up on any other platform, no one would have taken him seriously,†says O’Neill.
In fact, the thing I’m reminded most of with the App Store is the Home Computer revolution in the early 1980s. Matthew Smith of Manic Miner fame is still one of my heroes. Is iPhone/Android the modern equivalent of C64/ZXSpectrum?