Welcome to this week's edition of Counterclockwise - our weekly article that looks back in time at what happened in the last few years. This week it's a rollercoaster as predictions of future market share miss by a mile, while makers of smartphone apps sell for more money than makers of smartphones. We do have several high-profile phone launches to reminisce about too. Rise and fall At the very end of March 2011 IDC made some bold predictions - by 2015 iOS and BlackBerry will lose ground and the fresh Windows Phone 7 OS will climb to the #2 spot globally. With the benefit of hindsight, it's easy to see the analysts were very wide off the mark. The prediction for iOS was that it will mostly keep steady and according to Gartner's numbers for 2013 it's doing just that. Everything else, however, IDC got wrong. For one, its analysts were predicting BlackBerry will slip by a couple of percent, while in 2013 the global share of BB OS was under 2%. Now it's a question of whether the company as a whole will exist in 2015. The Windows Phone 7 prediction was even less accurate - Microsoft's OS (rather its reincarnation as WP8) is a distant third with less than double BlackBerry's share. Nokia did put out some impressive handsets a few days ago, but we doubt they'll be enough to reach the predicted market share of 21% in less than two years. A year after IDC's prediction, RIM posted a negative quarter, again, and then CEO Thorsten Heins wanted the company to refocus on the business sector that pushed the company to the top in the past. Since then the company changed its name and its CEO, what didn't change (unfortunately) is bottom line - it's still red. As that was going on, Android cracked the 50% mark in the US, securing its position as the top OS there, while the positions of both BlackBerry and Microsoft were slipping. That's not melting Windows Mobile shares either (like how Nokia was losing ground as Symbian lay dying), no this was Windows Phone under-performing. That week in 2012 marked another cornerstone for the US market - smartphones had finally surpassed feature phones, grabbing just over 50% of the market. It's all about the apps So why are smartphones so much more popular than feature phones today? Simple - apps. The smartphone's amazing ability to grow new functionality became so popular that it caught developers of desktop software and games by surprise. In 2009 things were still pretty new, however. Android, for example, just got its first document viewer - Documents-To-Go. Android was very green back then, we had just finished reviewing its first phone, the T-Mobile G1, a couple of weeks earlier. Another grand mobile app launched happen then too - Skype landed on the iPhone. The instant messenger became a juggernaut with its desktop app, these days it's the mobile IM clients that are the hottest software on earth. That's no exaggeration either, Microsoft bought Skype in 2012 for $8.5 billion, then Nokia for $7.2 billion a year later. This year, WhatsApp (a phone-only messenger) was bought by Facebook for a whopping $19 billion. Speaking of Nokia, this time in 2009 the Finns launched Nokia Messaging. Rather than IM, the app handled email and supported Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and even AOL Mail. Not that it ever reached the sort of popularity of WhatsApp and its kin. Anyway, BlackBerry smelled revenue in apps and in 2009 launched BlackBerry App World. Compatible with BB OS 4.2 and above, it supported PayPal payments and was a downloadable app rather than tightly integrated with the OS as the Apple App Store is, for example. A year later, in 2010 just as March was giving way to April, MapQuest 4 Mobile launched on the iPhone - a free GPS navigation app for the US. Back then we described it as "known as one of the best Google Maps alternatives." Google is now the undisputed champ of maps, but after a breakup with Apple, Gmaps was dropped as the native mapping application on iOS and replaced with an Apple-made app. It had a rocky start but is rapidly improving. Nokia may no longer be the leading map provider for phones, but it keeps working on it. In 2012 Nokia updated its Symbian and Windows Phone apps to show real time traffic updates. Google has this feature in Gmaps too, the fruit of a $1.1 billion acquisition of mobile...
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