The App is the killer

In early 2000s, when mobile phones were still a luxury and iPhone hadn’t arrived in the scene, We, working in Telecom domain, used to wonder what the killer app would be. I graduated from SS7, a Signalling protocol which has its elaborate TCP/IP like ultra reliable packet transmission stack used to setup and tear down telephone calls. I remember watching Olympics on the top part of a mobile which had a keyboard on the other half while testing a Push-to-talk solution we built inside a high secure operator network in Peru. Video on mobiles over GPRS (2.5G) was uncommon.

When I moved away from SS7, the main Apps were still around SS7 like prepaid or caller tunes buried in complex software programmed in obscure syntax sitting on servers running SS7. I dabbled into mobile games for a while, built multi-player tic-tac-toe over J2ME.

When we moved into IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) which is TCP/IP from your mobile handsets and all the associated infrastructure we tried numerous location based Apps like find the nearest Pizza. I remember we had gone too crazy on this path to find that one App that would turn out to be the killer, that would take over the world. I had written reams of documents and numerous prototypes that were early WhatsApp, transformed into context managing Apps like WeChat, that would do almost anything for you.

To jog my memory, something as crazy as, a mother goes to pickup a child from a school, gets into an accident, finds the nearest hospital, the hospital takes a video of her injury and streams it to the doctor, the doctor prescribes medicines and this brings the pharmacist into the context and so on. You get the point.

But now I realize there is no killer App. The App is the killer.