The One Device

by Brian Merchant

  I asked him how he could be sure that apps were the reason.

  “It was a one-to-one correlation. When we announced that we were going to have apps, and we started allowing them, that’s when people started buying the iPhone,” he says. Not only that, but it the increase was dramatic. “It was the knee of a hockey-stick spike. You saw it struggling, and then when it got to that point, it took off and started selling.”

  “Apps were a gold mine,” Grignon says.

  Grignon says one of the first successful apps they watched conquer the new ecosystem wasn’t a clever new productivity app or a flashy new multitouch-based video game. It was a fart machine.

  “The guy who wrote iFart made a million dollars on that fucking app. Of course we laugh at it today, but Jesus, dude, a million fucking dollars. From an app that plays fart noises.” How could that possibly be? Timing helped. “Culturally, his app was the first app to get featured on late-night talk shows. They were all making fun of him, but he was laughing all the way to the bank. That’s when we started to see the relevance of these things really hit the mainstream. It was like, the iPhone’s cool, but, you know—fart-app dude.”

  In 2007, the concept of an app had yet to infiltrate popular culture; computer users were certainly familiar with software applications, but most lay users probably thought of them as programs to be installed on a hard drive via CD-ROM.

  The iPhone, with its newly built-in App Store and intuitive user interface, set the conditions for a suite of simple, easy-to-program, and easy-to-use apps. It offered the opportunity to reframe how most users approached and used software programs. Maybe the app just needed a vessel to show that all manner of interactive software goofiness was available on this platform. Maybe it needed something sufficiently ridiculous to kick down the doors.

  “We didn’t kick them down, we blasted them down,” Joel Comm, illustrious creator of iFart, tells me. “There are just so many wonderful puns.”

  Joel Comm had been running online businesses since the nineties, and when Apple announced its SDK in 2008, he immediately set his small outfit, InfoMedia, to work. “Our first app was not called iFart, it was iVote. It was one of the first thousand apps that came out in 2008.” Alas, the civic-minded app didn’t make much of an impression. “We whiteboarded so many other ideas—you know Pokémon Go? We had an idea like that for ghosts, in 2008. But we did not laugh harder than when one of our team said, ‘Let’s do a fart machine.’ So I said, ‘Let’s do that.’”

  When they were just about finished with the app, they saw that another fart app, Pull My Finger, had been rejected. First, they were surprised that someone had already tried their hand at a fart app (though they were convinced theirs was better). Then they were bummed: “‘Apple isn’t approving fart apps,’” Comm says. “‘Let’s shelve it, we don’t want to upset the Apple gods.’ So we literally sat on it and turned to some other stuff.” A little time passed, though, and the team still laughed whenever someone brought up iFart. So Comm decided to go for it anyway. “It’s either submit or get off the pot,” he says. “They just keep coming.”

  Apparently Apple had a change of heart on their flatulence policy. They soon got word that “iFart and three other fart apps got approved. One of them was Pull My Finger. I immediately put out a press release. Our app was better in every way, so we raced up the charts.” They priced the app at ninety-nine cents. By Christmas, he says, they had sold just short of thirty thousand units. It was about then, as Grignon mentioned, the media got hold of it. “It went to the top of the charts, number one in the world, and stayed there for just over three weeks.” George Clooney declared it his favorite app. Bill Maher said, “If your phone can fart, you’re part of the problem.”

  The success of iFart signaled an oncoming gold rush in a new digital Wild West of an economy. “I probably netted half a million dollars and way more value in publicity and PR and credibility. Two million downloads or more.” All told, it was the result of about three weeks of work from a handful of people.

  “It’s not any stroke of genius,” Comm says. “It’s the perfect timing. ‘Let’s make this thing fart, and let’s do it in an elegant way.’ I think it was the novelty of it, the production of it, the storytelling around it in the media. It was not complicated; it was a sound machine.” Half a million dollars in profit from making a digital whoopee cushion. It seemed silly on one level, but it was a harbinger of a new era of opportunity for developers and a new approach. Clearly, most of the breakout early apps weren’t so lowbrow—many early successes were games, like Tap Tap Revenge, Super Monkey Ball, and a Texas Hold’Em poker app, and many were truly exciting, like Pandora Radio and Shazam, which continue to be successful today.

  “Of course, now, everyone’s writing fart apps, but he was the original,” Grignon says. “Apple had minted this new economy. And the early gold diggers won big.”

  This new economy, now colloquially known as the app economy, has evolved into a multibillion-dollar market segment dominated by nouveau-riche Silicon Valley companies like Uber, Facebook, Snapchat, and Airbnb. The App Store is a vast universe, housing hopeful start-ups, time-wasting games, media platforms, spam clones, old businesses, art projects, and experiments with new interfaces.

  But, given the extent to which the iPhone has entered the app into the global vernacular, I thought it was worth taking stock of what, at its core, an app actually is, and what this celebrated new market segment represents. So I reached out to Adam Rothstein, a Portland-based digital archivist and media theorist who has studied early apps; he has a collection of volvelles, which are some of the earliest—they have existed for hundreds of years.

  “One way to think about apps are as ‘simplified interfaces for visualizing data,’” Rothstein says. “Any app, whether social media, mapping, weather, or even a game, takes large amounts of data and presents it through a small interface, with a variety of buttons or gestures for navigating and manipulating that data. A volvelle does the same. It takes data from a chart and presents it in a round, slide-rule-like interface so the user can easily view the different data relationships.”

  At its simplest, a volvelle is basically a paper wheel with a data set inscribed on it that’s fastened to another paper wheel with its own data set. The wheels can be manipulated to produce easily parsable information about the world.

  “Volvelle with three moving parts representing the zodiac, the sun, and the moon, and showing their relative positions and the moon’s phases, and astronomical diagram” (British Library).

  They were invented by Islamic astronomers in the medieval era and were used as reference tools, navigation aids, and calculators. “They were innovative in the eleventh and twelfth century when they first appeared and relied on the relatively high technology of paper as well as the knowledge of experts and bookbinders to make them function,” Rothstein says.

  Some of the first mobile apps, then, were made of paper. “We’ve been offloading information into outsourced brains for centuries, and it is nice to feel the lineage in its continuity, from cardboard to touchscreen,” Rothstein notes. Volvelles are actually considered by some historians to be primitive analog computers. “The Antikythera”—the earliest known computing device, that mysterious Greek astrolabe whose precise origins scientists have been unable to successfully pin down—“is older, and there are abacuses and counting sticks. But [the volvelle] is certainly an old-school app.”

  The point is that people have been using tools to simplify and wield data and coordinate solutions for centuries. Take Uber: the ride-hailing app’s major innovation is its ability to efficiently pair a rider with a driver. The app reads the fluid data set of the number of available drivers in an area, taken by their GPS signals, and cross-references it with the number of desiring riders. Where those data sets intersect is where you and the driver meet for your ride. Uber is a GPS-and-Google-Maps-powered, for-profit volvelle.

  “I think it’s worth remembering that even as we develop new
technology, we’ve developed many similar technologies in different forms throughout human history. We may come up with a better technology, but we are often using it to solve what is essentially the same problem. Even as we look to apply new technologies as completely and wholly new, we should remember that even as we reinvent the wheel, it’s still a wheel. Many basic human needs are more timeless than we like to admit,” Rothstein says.

  People today may be using billions of transistors arranged on a subatomic level inside a state-of-the-art microprocessor, but a lot of the time—maybe most of the time—we’re harnessing that computational power to accomplish the same sort of things as early adopters in medieval times.

  That’s important to keep in mind when considering the app economy.

  There are, after all, over two million apps in the App Store today. “Apple ignited the app revolution with the launch of the App Store in 2008,” the company says on its website. “In just six years, the iOS ecosystem has helped create over 627,000 jobs, and U.S.-based developers have earned more than $8 billion from App Store sales worldwide.”

  In 2016, one report estimated that the app economy was worth $51 billion and that it would double by 2020. In early 2017, Apple announced it had paid out $20 billion to developers in 2016 and that January 1 was the single biggest day in App Store sales in the company’s history; people downloaded $240 million worth of apps. Snapchat, a video-messaging app, is valued at $16 billion. Airbnb is worth $25 billion. Instagram, which was acquired by Facebook for $1 billion five years ago, is allegedly worth $35 billion now. And the biggest app-based company of all, Uber, is currently valued at $62.5 billion.

  “The app industry is now bigger than Hollywood,” Dediu tells me, “but nobody really talks about it.” Given that Apple is such a massive company and that the vast majority of its sales come from iPhones, just how successful they have been in the App Store business can be underappreciated—remember, they take a 30 percent cut of all sales made there, just for offering the platform. “People ask, Can Apple get into becoming a services business? Well, strangely, they have done that pretty successfully, because they’re making forty billion in sales on that.” Dediu says Apple would be a Fortune 100 company “in services on that alone. I haven’t done the numbers yet, but I think they’re actually making more money than Facebook on those services. Maybe Amazon as well.”

  That’s incredible. Apple may be making more money by hosting its App Store than two of the other biggest technology companies in the world make in total.

  To better understand how the App Store might fit into a historical context, I reached out to David Edgerton, a historian of technology at Oxford University. Edgerton is the author of The Shock of the Old, a book that chronicles all the ways that it’s usually old, persistent technologies that mold our lives. Referring to the iPhone and the app economy, he said in an email: “One of the great problems is that practically all changes in the economy in the past decades have been attributed to IT,” meaning information technology. “It has become, rhetorically, sometimes the only cause of change. This is clearly absurd.” He’s talking about the penchant of many financial analysts and economic observers to attribute growth and progress to technology, to the iPhone and the app economy.

  “One of the really massive global changes has come from the liberalization of markets, not least labour markets. There is a big difference between saying Uber is caused by IT, and saying it is caused by a desire to maximize the work of taxis and taxi drivers and have them in relentless competition with each other,” he wrote, adding, “Note also that high tech once led to a world of leisure; it now leads to unrelenting work.”

  How powerful and transformative a force is the app economy? Has it fundamentally changed lives, or has it merely rearranged the deck chairs on a Titanic simulator app?

  One way to find out was to get about as far away from the Silicon Valley bubble as possible, somewhere locals believe in that transformative power—a place called Silicon Savanna.

  Look out the airplane window during its descent into Nairobi, and, as you close in on the city, you’ll see a sprawling, unexpected stretch of savanna. Squint, and with some luck, you might be able to spot a giraffe. The airport is just a few miles outside of Nairobi National Park, the world’s only such reserve inside a major metropolis. Look out that window of yours, and you’ll see a bustling city in the grip of metamorphosis—skyscrapers, apartment buildings, roads, and every stripe of infrastructure under construction.

  You’ll have plenty of opportunity to soak in the view. Nairobi seems perpetually snarled in traffic. Banana and sugarcane vendors line the streets—at one point, after we hadn’t moved for ten minutes, my driver rolls down the window and buys us a bag of sugarcane—and the city’s famous matatu buses, decked out in tie-dye paint jobs or maybe a portrait of Kanye West, will inch and swerve their way past. Get closer to downtown, and you’ll see a bevy of billboards and bus ads hawking mobile goods and services.

  I’d traveled here to try to get a sense of just how much the app economy had affected developing economies, and I figured the country heralded as the tech savviest in Africa was a good place to look.

  Kenya is uniquely mobile (in every way besides the traditional one, I guess). In 2007, the same year that the iPhone debuted, Kenya’s national telecom, Safaricom, partnered with the multinational Vodafone to launch M-Pesa (pesa means “money” in Swahili), a mobile-payment system that allowed Kenyans to use their cell phones to easily transfer funds. Based on research that showed Kenyans had been transferring airtime among themselves as currency, not long after the system was implemented, M-Pesa took off. Since then, due to the popularity of M-Pesa, Kenya is close to becoming one of the first nations on the globe to adopt a paperless currency.

  Also in 2007, Kenya saw unrest spread after the incumbent president refused to step down in the wake of a disputed election, one that independent observers deemed “flawed.” Protests arose, mostly peaceful, but the police took to violently suppressing them. Hundreds of people were shot and killed. Meanwhile, violence was escalating along ethnic lines, and a crisis was soon declared.

  As the reports of violent suppression began to surface, Kenya-based bloggers moved to act. Erik Hersman, Juliana Rotich, Ory Okolloh, and David Kobia built a platform called Ushahidi (“testimony” in Swahili) that allowed users to report incidents with their mobile phones. Those reports were then collated on a map so users could chart the violence, and stay safe. Ushahidi quickly caught on internationally, and it was used to track anti-immigrant violence in South Africa, to monitor elections in Mexico and India, in the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, and during the fallout of the BP Gulf spill.

  The mobile-based platforms brought Kenya to international attention as a hotbed of innovation. Bloomberg BusinessWeek calls Nairobi “the tech hub of Africa.” TechCrunch, that great arbiter of Silicon Valley buzz, notes, “Most discussions of the origins of Africa’s tech movement circle back to Kenya.” When Google sought to make inroads on the continent, it set up shop in Nairobi. Time magazine dubbed it “Silicon Savanna” and the name stuck. The timeline of Kenya’s mobile success ran parallel to the emerging app boom, which drove mobile-minded investors, entrepreneurs, charities, and social enterprises to Nairobi.

  “In your 2008 to 2012, that was the height of the mobile revolution, so everything had to have an m—mobile books, mobile whatever it was,” Muthuri Kinyamu tells me. Kinyamu runs Communications and Programs for Nest Global and is a veteran of Nairobi’s tech scene. During that time, a lot of interested groups were looking to fund mobile start-ups that could result in an Ushahidi-like success story.

  In an effort to help Kenyan entrepreneurs, developers, and start-ups capitalize on the growing buzz and bring those systems to market, in 2010, Erik Hersman and his co-founders at Ushahidi founded iHub. Originally self-funded, it received a $1.4 million infusion from Omidyar Networks, the eBay founder’s “philanthropic investment firm.” A co-working space outfitted wit
h high-speed internet, iHub encouraged start-ups and developers to pool skills and resources.

  “It helped catalyze, helped things move faster,” Hersman says. Hersman, who is American, grew up in Kenya and Sudan and has long blogged about the region on his site, the White African. “I think that one of the reasons that Kenya has done better in this space—Nigeria has the numbers, South Africa has the money, but the community has been tighter knit over the years. So people do tend to band together to get things done. It’s a very Kenyan thing. This idea of pamoja, which is Swahili for ‘come together.’”

  As iHub is hardly a household name even in Nairobi, my Uber driver had no idea what or where it was, despite the ostensible GPS guidance from the app. We searched for it down dusty, half-paved roads before finding it on a main thoroughfare on Ngong Road. Its logo hangs high up on the fourth story of a colorful office building. When I got inside, it was crowded and electric. Laptops on every table, coffee bar in the corner, a hum of animated conversation. Considering just the internal design, decor, and vibe alone, I could have been in Palo Alto.

  I met Nelson Kwame, an entrepreneur who splits his time between his start-up, Web4All, and his freelance developer work.

  Kwame was born in Sudan in 1991 after his father fled the catastrophic war that would eventually split the nation in two. He came to Kenya to attend university and is motivated by the belief that fluency in technology is the key to the region’s future. He uses iHub both as a place to find potential partners and as a place to find gigs. “Let’s say my friend who’s a developer, his uncle works for a company that needs an app,” he says, and Kwame is game. “I do a lot of websites, and a lot of apps.” And he does indeed think that coding, and web development, and, increasingly, app development are crucial skills for the region’s growth. His start-up organizes daylong classes in different locations to help teach coding, development, and entrepreneurship skills—he just did one in Mombasa, Kenya’s major seaside port city. It was packed.