App Store and Play Store

When we want a app to do something specific with our smartphone or our PC, we resort to the corresponding application store, from which we download, install and start using it. However, things were not always so easy.

Before the popularization of application stores, there were some services and websites with a similar purpose, but basically it was each of the software producers who published their program on their own website and were looking for life to make it known to any of the existing repositories on the Internet.

Who had the great idea to create the first application store as we know today was Apple with the App Store, which was launched in 2008 shortly after the launch of the first iPhone (the latter, in 2007).

Apple not only created a centralized repository, a site that anyone could go to to install any application on your phone, but also had the right idea to do it required.

This implies that the Username of an iPhone, iPad or device that uses iOS (the

operating system mobile phone) you can not download and install anything that is not extracted directly from the App Store.

But, for developers, this means no longer depending on who visits your website to to download their applications, but instead had a universal showcase in which everyone, equality of conditions, they could expose their product.

It was, at the time, a revolution parallel to the multi-store shopping center; If we want to buy, we have to go from store to store, or to the large area of ​​a supermarket chain. With shopping centers, however, we find a multitude of stores and brands in a single space, which also offers us additional services.

Apple's model caught on, since it was beneficial for users, developers, and the apple company itself, so the other manufacturers and platforms followed suit.

This was the case with BlackBerry, for example, and also Google, which only took a few months longer than Apple to launch its own app store (initially Android Market, later renamed Google Play).

Unlike Apple, Google still allows the user of an Android device to download and install an application that does not come from its store, although it does not recommend it for reasons of safety.

In this sense, it should be noted that both in the App Store and in Google Play, it has been found malware sometime.

Over time, app stores have adopted various content for sale, such as music, movies, books, and magazines.

All these contents are designed for your consumption from the smartphone or the tablet, and so that they can be shared between different devices, by means of synchronization between them.

And not only portable devices use this distribution model of software, which has also ended up reaching desktop operating systems, such as Windows or Linux Ubuntu.

With this, the application stores of the different platforms, and especially those of Apple and Google, have become one of the main engines of the new economy digital.

Photo: Fotolia - Natchapon

Themes on the App Store and Play Store