All of them really – I was born in 1980, and my first phone looked like this:
You had to stick your finger in the corresponding circle and spin it until you hit that metal bar. Imagine spelling something with this.
My mom eventually upgraded to a touch tone phone on the kitchen counter with a 20-ft cord. This way, we could talk on the phone in private.
My friend would notoriously call people and pose the question, “hey, where are you at?” Knowing full well he called the house phone and we’re at home.
Business executives had a Rolodex, while ordinary families relied on a phone book for storing important contacts. Many people wrote friends’ phone numbers on a sheet of paper that ended up looking like a serial killer’s manifesto 😹
We even had a separate voicemail machine that would record messages on a mini tape cassette for us.
Of course, the internet was on dial up back then, and it wasn’t long before my brother and I were causing problems for our parents by tying up the phone line.
They had to pay for a second phone line to enable call waiting. This let them receive calls while we were online. And they upgraded to a cordless phone.
This all required a home phone line though and were tethered to your house.
It wasn’t until college when I got my first cell phone – a Nokia 3310.
There was still a long way to go though. At this time, you only had a rudimentary display, and I preferred people call me instead of text. You could buy apps, games, ringtones, and ringback tones in those early days, but you bought them from your phone carrier and they were added to your phone bill.
It wasn’t until the first iPhone that it changed.
By this measure, the most epic apps are the Google Play and Apple App stores, which changed the business model and encouraged a lot more app and game development.
However, there are many other low key amazing apps when you consider what the world used to be and is now:
- Facebook/Instagram – Social media defined how many people use our phones. They also changed the way we discover content online. It used to be that Googling something was the answer to everything, but now you can just ask your friends or groups on social.
- Robinhood – Investing was once a hassle for the average person. But Robinhood has a sleek UI that makes it much easier to do everything from day trading to long term investing for retirement.
- Spotify/Pandora – It wasn’t long ago that physical album sales drove the music industry, but streaming is the way to go. Do you even know how hard it used to be to convert your CDs to MP3 and manage playlists before streaming?
- Netflix – Watching a movie on a phone used to be a laughable proposition (see above phones). Before Netflix, you had to find ways to digitize, store, and access huge movie files. There are infinitely better video streaming apps but this is the most recognizable name.
- Signal – It may not be sexy, but secure E2E encrypted messaging is a godsend in the era of government monitoring. Many phone laws were written to cover only the phone app within your smartphone. Everything else is app data and can be treated different from a legal perspective.
- BandLab – A music production studio was once out of reach of the average consumer. You had to buy a lot of equipment that’s now boiled down to an app. Even a high end desktop computer 20 years ago couldn’t accomplish what your phone can now.
- Pokémon Go – It wasn’t the first, but this AR game spawned an entire industry around AR that helped it outlast Android-based VR. This is one of the first times brands tried offering a metaverse to explore IRL and online.
- Oculus – It’s worth mentioning that Oculus Quest and Quest 2 (which run on Android) finally killed the idea that we should use our dirty phones as VR screens. Oculus killed cardboard, and I couldn’t be happier.
- Google Translate – Communicating with people who speak other languages isn’t easy. Thankfully Google Translate turns your phone into a smart voice or text translator across over 100 global languages.
- IFTTT – Automation is the wave of the future, and IFTTT is the glue for any type of triggered events you need to happen across the internet, with your smart home, smart car, and more. If you really want to harness the power of automation, this is how to start.
That’s just a quick top 10 pulled from thin air. Like I said at the top, they’re all amazing (even the phone app) when compared to what we had when I was a kid. The phone directory, your contacts list, text, email, it’s all light years ahead of where it was in decades past.