Part IV in the Ongoing Saga of the History behind App Inventor

The core openness of Android quickly became its primary driving factor. The HTC Dream was released by T-Mobile in the U.S. as the G1 in October of 2008 as the first commercially available cellphone handset powered by Android.  By April of 2009 T-Mobile alone had sold over a million G1 devices.  And the Android Revolution began, with most major handset manufacturers carrying some version of an Android Device by mid-2010.

Each and every Android device had a set of core functions but allowed the user to download and install other apps as the user desired.  This in itself was not a particularly new idea. But the openness of the market and development platform was very different. Developers did not have to go through an expensive or irritatingly draconian approval process for their applications. Developers rushed to get app’s into Google’s “App Market” for prices ranging from free and advertisement supported to a few dollars. The App Market began to grow almost exponentially as developers tried to fill the different niches they identified in the market. Until today the App Market's growth is a little staggering in terms of the number released by AndroLib. 

 The availability of applications to fill the functional need that an individual identified was not a new concept. The iPhone, Blackberry and Symbian carriers had similar markets albeit not open in nature. Apparently "Open" wasn't such a bad idea in terms of market adoption and growth afterall. 

But Google had yet another revolutionary concept up their sleeve.

( See Market and App statistics here http://www.androlib.com/appstats.aspx show them some love.)
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