22 Android Market
Today, we take it for granted that there’s a place we go to buy our apps. You have a phone, you want an app—you go to the application store to get it. Obviously.
But back before Android and the iPhone, that simple ecosystem didn’t exist.
It’s not that companies didn’t want it to exist; they kept trying to create something like it. You could buy services from carriers (mostly ringtones and simple utilities), and there were various repositories for games. But the market for apps wasn’t there (since there wasn’t a lot that apps could do on those limited devices, at that time), so users weren’t missing much. But once there ...
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