“Apple’s App Store, which celebrates its fifth birthday [this] week [July 10], has become an economy all of its own,” Tim Bradshaw reports for The Financial Times.
“More than $10bn has been paid to developers of its 850,000 apps over the past five years. The platform has created multimillion-dollar businesses such as Rovio, maker of Angry Birds, Instagram, the photo-sharing app, and Shazam, the music recognition service,” Bradshaw reports. “For Apple, the popularity of the App Store with customers and developers is a key asset in a smartphone and tablet market where competition will only get more intense. So the stakes were high last month when the company unveiled the latest version of its software platform for the iPhone and iPad, iOS 7.”
Bradshaw reports, “After almost a month of testing iOS 7, designers and developers outside Apple are polarised in their reactions to the redesign. Many are scrambling to reconfigure their apps to fit the new aesthetic… iOS 7 is a bold gamble that the next five years can be as lucrative for Apple and its app economy as the past five.”
Read more in the full article here.