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Before Android and iOS, no third-party developer cared about smartphones/PDAs, because they were a tiny sliver of the market and so you couldn't make money targ
by derefr 4y ago
Before Android and iOS, no third-party developer cared about smartphones/PDAs, because they were a tiny sliver of the market and so you couldn't make money targeting them. Bigcorps like Microsoft/Facebook/Twitter might make free apps for these, just to cover them (since their own employees used them); but no ISV cared. If you were an ISV developing paid "apps" for "mobile" at all, you were developing J2ME apps for feature-phones.
- int_19h 4y agoThat's plainly not true. Sure, there weren't "millions of apps" in the store, but like I mentioned above, there was actual boxed software sold for those platforms.
- derefr 4y agoMy point is that no ISV ever bootstrapped or got VC-funded in the 1995-2007 period by making a bet on selling "apps" for the PDA software market; the revenue would be too low to keep the company going, and the TAM would be too low for even longer-term-minded VCs to be interested. What probably did happen, a bit, was that ISVs that made software for other markets, may have ported their software to PDAs, and sold that. (E.g. "WinZip for Windows CE", things like that.) But that doesn't mean that these companies were surviving off of this. These were effectively "halo products" (products that don't sell many units, which are made instead to increase the brand perception of key influencers who happen to have such niche interests, and thus influence their [influential] opinion of the rest of the product range through the halo effect.)