A few of years ago, it seemed like mobile applications, the expected “next big thing” at the time, would just never take off. Everyone was excited, people were creating apps and expecting huge adoption, telco companies were projecting an explosion of data usage on phones but none of this was really happening with the users. Why? well now, with hindsight, we know that the problem was the far-from-perfect user experience on mobile apps : they were slow, had unfriendly interfaces, and average phone screens were barely larger than stamps. Don’t get me wrong, these apps were not crappy, some of them were actually very good. But something about them limited the market to motivated users, or specific business applications. But the holy grail of exponential market adoption was out of their reach.
Then Apple launched the iPhone with amazing applications and great interface. Within a couple months mobile apps were everywhere.
