In the binary world of online communications, companies like Apple and Google are either valorized for their highly influential products and actions or vilified for the same reasons. Take the iPhone, which turns 10 years old this week, as the most obvious and polarizing example. You can either think of it as Apple’s revolutionary gadget that redefined an industry and most of our lives, or you can deem it to be the overhyped foam atop the more democratic and important Google Android wave. I think there’s truth to both perspectives, but more interesting to me are the nuances and shades of gray in between the extremes.
Apps, apps, apps
For a great many people, the iPhone has served as the physical conduit of a revelatory technological experience. My first taste of that came in 2009 when I first used Google Maps (then known as just Maps) and Safari on the iPhone 3GS. The fluidity of scrolling and navigating in both was so far ahead of any other phone I’d tried up to that point that I had to question why we even bothered to review other phones.
Ask others about their most memorable, pleasant, or addictive phone experience and you’ll hear many familiar names: Angry Birds and Clash of Clans, Instagram and Instapaper, WhatsApp and Snapchat, Netflix and Spotify, Infinity Blade and Monument Valley, and of course Twitter and Facebook. The iPhone played a pivotal role in either giving those apps a start or popularizing them, but all of those are third-party apps. Apple made the App Store, but didn’t make the app revolution. Tweetie gave the world the pull-to-refresh action, Instagram taught us to love squares, Foursquare made us neurotic about “checking in,” and Google engineers made YouTube as addictive on mobile devices as on the web.
When I look at the iPhone as a phenomenon and an influence of my life, what stands out are not the glints of sunlight reflecting off its chamfered metal edges, but the glorious apps running on it. It’s those late-night Telegram messages from a distant friend, or the unfinished digital copy of Robinson Crusoe in my Kindle library that I nibble at on commutes into town. If the iPhone had been just a great slice of hardware, a beautifully arranged sculpture made of silicon, aluminum, and glass, it’d have been pretty, but it wouldn’t have mattered anywhere near as much as it does. The iPhone has defined the best practices in mobile computing — and even influenced much of modern thinking about desktop software design — because of the software that has been created to make the most of its capabilities.