Today I wanna discuss Mobile Apps, what are their purpose? Why are people making money from them? The answer is more black & white then you think.

The first mobile app i want to discuss is Tik-Tok,
this application was released in September of 2016 and since then reported 4.5 billion downloads.
Tik-tok is widely known for it’s “shorts” which is the term used for short thirty second recordings of “content creators” doing something in front of their phone camera for viewership.
Why is Tik-Tok popular? well it’s believe it reached it’s peak around 2019 as a means to pass the time while everyone was under sustained lockdown for a brief period of time leading to the rise in viewers and “content creators” seeking to make it big on the platform.
The platform itself operates like another application called “Youtube” except with shorter videos, this is intentional as viewers attention spans grew shorter and shorter the rise in shorter and shorter content videos grew.
Tik-tok as of 2023 was priced at $66 Billion, That is the most successful startup of an app in history.
So how much does a content creator get paid on tiktok? Well the answer might scare you. As of writing a normal content creator will make between 0.02$ to 0.15$ per 1000 views while if you average around One Million followers you make reportedly around 7k to 12k PER POST.

The second mobile application I would like to discuss is one not typically discussed, it’s your phones “app store”.
The names vary based on devices between Apple and Android, but the services are about if not identical.
The application seems harmless as most people tend to ignore it or use it briefly to download content that they want on their devices then never typically touch it again except, the app is consistently operating but why?
The application store is a mobile application that comes preinstalled into all mobile devices with the sole function for the user to safely download software and applications to their phones with the peace of mind that they arent also installing malware of viruses onto their devices from third party websites.
So what is the problem with the application store?
Well the issue lies in that all iterations of the application store are a “Single Point” failure, this is referring to the rise in application software being uploaded to these webstores for users to download and use on their mobile devices. These stores rely on a “centralized control” this means that the company who created the webstore has sole jurisdiction on what applications can be uploaded to the store and what apps viewers like yourself can see. A reporter says “While this decade seems to be based on distributed systems/clouds and open standards, the application store is essentially a step backwards. It transforms the open nature of the internet into a dark age where freedom is taken away from you.” this is referring to the reports of Apples iron grip around their application store and what content can be uploaded to it for others to share and download. Developers have reported frustration with the IT logic of thinking behind constantly upgrading the terms of services of acceptable applications within their store.