It’s exactly a decade since the iPhone was formally announced. The handset changed the tech industry and how companies interact with customers, and more than a billion have since been made. Sean Endicott has been talking to Nottingham developers about how a phone almost took over the world.
The iPhone was not even the first smartphone, but it was the smartphone that blazed the trail, affecting the shape of devices and how people interact with them.
Ian Naylor, founder and CEO of AppInstitute, which makes apps and app-making software on Stoney Street in Nottingham, says: “If you look at the number of smartphones ten years ago they still existed but they didn’t rely on touch… whereas the iPhone came out and changed the world.”
The change in shape brought about by the iPhone changed how companies across the world interact with customers.
Kit Pierce, chief technical officer of Reaper Miniatures, a worldwide company which has an office in Beeston, points out that companies have to cater to mobile users.
“Now everybody knows that your thing is gonna fit in this little rectangle that fits in everyone’s pocket,” he said.
“That’s just how it’s done now. You’re gonna do mobile or people aren’t going to use your stuff.”
He added that after the launch of the iPhone, Facebook, Amazon and many other companies entered the mobile space.
The iPhone itself has come a long way in the last ten years. Naylor pointed out that the original iPhone didn’t have copy and paste functionality.
It’s also increased in speed, size, power, and number of features. Pierce compared the power of new smart phones to other devices.
“The phones being produced today are as powerful as basic low end laptops these days.”
As the iPhone proved to be successful, Apple expanded their product lines of touch-enabled devices through their line of tablets.
Much like the iPhone, the iPad was not the first device of its kind but it was one of the first commercially successful one and played a similar role in the tablet market to what the iPhone did with phones. This, at least indirectly, connects the iPhones to the success of tablets as well as mobile phones.
Largely on the back of the iPhone, Apple became the most valuable brand in the world according to Forbes, being valued at $154.1 billion.
The tech industry as a whole is one of the biggest in the world and that was sparked by the release of the iPhone in 2007.