And arguably far more necessary. We have our phones turned on and with us almost 100% of the time we are alive. They can track our locations and hear everything we say. It's more important to control what apps can have access to with smartphones than it was on any prior platform.

We got here rather simply... Apple introduced the iPhone with no apps at all, then gave a half-assed open solution (bookmarks on your home screen, essentially), then they introduced the App Store, with their rules. Since there was no other way to get apps on the phone (short of jailbreaking), App Store won and Play Store was built in this model.

Other smartphones in this space at the time (Windows Mobile and Blackberry) didn't quite capture the imaginations like Apple did. WM was fairly easy to sideload apps to; not sure about Blackberry.

You have to get there from the start; the app store has to be there from day one. Since that didn't happen on the desktop, it's pretty hard to retroactively introduce one (although Microsoft is trying hard).

Mass market is how we got here.

The phone made the flow of non tech savvy users the main source of income.

Before, you had to please geeks, and they thought about products, compared, communicated, criticized and decided where to spend their money.

Now, you have to please people that chose products based on ads, design and trends, but don't have any basic understanding of their device yet makes a lot of noise when they get them self in trouble.

That's the same story anywhere you start with a group of passionate people on something that proves successful: amateurs arrive, then money, then policy.

Any job, hobby, venue, city, sport, product, etc. is susceptible to this problem.

It's why the mt Everest is now an expensive highway full of frozen shit, why battle net turned into an insult party, why Adventure park now have those unusable security systems that take the fun out of it, why websites abuse "target=_blank", why you have weird safety messages on microwaves and why you need to provide medical certificates for so many stupid things now a day.

But.

It's also why you can have a device in your pocket that act as your camera, tv, music player, news provider, landline, game console, pager, gps, phonebook for a 10th of the price of a gigantic calculator from 40 years ago.

In the hilarious canadian comedy, "The Decline of the American Empire", the main character makes a point, stating there are 3 things that makes a winner in history: 1, number. 2, number. 3, number.

Desktop OS where designed for physical media first (side loading). The freedom came first, became part of the expected feature of a desktop, and it would be difficult to take it away.

iPhone defined the image of the smartphone and they started internet first with a curated appstore.

Also remember that in day to day life, from a user perspective, there are more benefits than downsides to the AppStore. Even today, finding software, software update, compatibility, license management, consistent original media availability, ... are actual problems in the desktop (especially windows) world and almost non existent in the iphone/smartphone world.

To go back on the topic. I do hope that the TVApp does succeed, otherwise eventually a market actor will solve the problem and someone will wonder in 10 years how we ended up with cable companies again.

This is why I was always bemused at the glee with which people reacted to the deaths of all the other smartphone endeavors.

And the tech press played a huge role in this with their blatant bias as well in my opinion.

A healthy platforms war would have ensured that Apple/Google would have had to think twice about some of these practices.