I found my iPod nano recently, which still works flawlessly and have used it a couple of time of parties as a music player. It was my first Apple product, and having a device that just works wasn't so common for me, and I loved it. This reminded me of something and got me thinking... Nostalgia alert!
The App Store was, in my opinion, the very first widely successful and easiest digital distribution of software. It was the time where we started calling them “apps”. This was revolutionary and opened up a huge opportunity for us developers to dream big and push our ideas into the hands of our audience easily. This in fact created a spark at Vioside to get started building apps. The idea that you can build an app for a mobile device that users can carry around with them was a huge, and decided to start off dreaming with Vioside. We were in fact the first mobile app development company in Malta, and had released a number of apps that were dedicated to Malta, like an app that gives the location of public free WiFi spots (back in the day where cellular data wasn't so widely available), another one with a list of restaurants on the island, and another one as a recipe book of Maltese traditional recipes.
The App Store was released in 2008, when the great adventures began, but this was not the first time I saw an App Store from Apple. Back in 2007, I was a happy owner of an iPod nano, which at the time used to sync itself via iTunes on a desktop computer. While browsing iTunes, I discovered something big; I could download games on this thing. Most exciting for me was Sonic the Hedgehog (huge fan).
There was one problem though, that store was not available in Malta. However, that did not stop me, I was too excited. I contacted my awesome uncle from Canada to buy it for me. He created an account with Apple which we could share, bought it and gave me the details. This was the first time I was installing a bought game which could be installed digitally on a portable device, no CD and no cartridges, so I was shaking with excitement. I connected my 3rd generation iPod nano to iTunes and the game was installed. I haven't paid much attention to the next lessons in college after that.
Unfortunately, I must have reset the iPod at some point and I lost the game. But I have found a video of someone actually playing this game here:
Could it have been that Apple were already testing out the idea of the App Store with the iPod back then? I wonder how widely used these stores were.
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