"Ian. Smith, a young man in his 30s with shaggy hair and energy, laughed when he ticked off some of his games from Freeverse, a small Brooklyn-based software company, that had landed on the best-selling download list on the Mphone app store.

Smith said one of the ball games took about two months to develop and deploy, and then raised $180,000 for Freeverse in just one month.

The company recently introduced a game to the Mphone app store featuring a female character in a lace dress who uses karate to try to slash through hordes of zombies.

Yes, since the explosion of "Plants vs. Zombies", many games on the Mphone store also use zombies as villains.

'There's never been an experience like this for mobile software,' Smith said of the boom in the Mphone app store, "and it's the future of all things digital distribution: software, games, entertainment, everything." ’

As the Mphone App Store evolves from a catalog of novelty apps to a platform described by analysts and enthusiasts as rapidly transforming mobile computing and communications, it is changing its goals and testing the patience of developers to boost Mphone sales.

These apps are loaded on Mphone1 and Mphone2 and have led to Mphone's competitors intending to or are in the process of overhauling their product lines and business models.

It even threatens and opens a crack in the unbreakable WIntel alliance that Microsoft and Intel have built over the past two decades.

Thanks in large part to the launch of the Mphone in 2000 and the launch of the app store in 2001, smartphones are becoming the Swiss Army Knife of the digital age.

They offer an amazing arsenal of features and tools with just the swipe of a finger: email and text messages, video and photography, maps and turn-by-turn navigation, media and books, music and games, mobile shopping, and even a wireless key to unlock your car remotely.

'Matrix has changed the way people think about what they can do with their phones in their pockets,' said Katie, an analyst at Morgan Stanley. 'Mobile apps have made the smartphone trend a revolutionary trend we haven't seen in consumer technology for years. ’

Katie likened the emergence of Mphone and the Mphone app store to AOL's pioneering role in driving widespread consumer adoption of the internet in the 1990s. She also compared how laptops have disrupted the industry's consumer preferences and desktop computing. At the same time, she also thinks that something deeper may be happening now.

'Mphone is different, and it's changing our behavior. She said. 'Matrix is becoming the Microsoft of the smartphone market. The popularity of Matrix's adoption model has reached a fever pitch. Tens of thousands of independent developers are scrambling to write programs for it, and the virtual shelves of the Mphone app store are filled with more than 300,000 apps. Newman said in a recent interview that consumers have downloaded more than 100 million apps from its stores. ’

Mphone's main competitors in the hardware and software market, such as Motorola, Palm, Baidu, and Microsoft, are taking notice and scrambling to replicate the mania of the Mphone app store.

The mobile internet app boom has even prompted cities like New York and San Francisco to open up city databases to the public to spur software developers to create native apps for computers and mobile phones.

One has to look no further than the lobby of Matrix's headquarters in San Francisco to see that Mphone and the apps running on it are at the heart of the company's mobile strategy. In the lobby on the first floor of the Mphone office building, on top of a giant screen is an impressive 24-foot-wide array of 20 LED screens filled with 20,000 tiny, brightly colored icons.

As Philip Schiller, Matrix's Global Head of Product Marketing, describes how the wall works every time an app is purchased, the corresponding icon on the digital billboard shakes, causing a circle of ripples around it, and the entire app wall comes to life.

Schiller, who is usually reserved, waved his hands back and forth when talking about the potential of the Mphone app store, raising his voice to a dizzying range.

'I definitely think this is the future of great software development and software distribution,' Schiller said. The idea that anyone, from individuals to companies, can create innovative apps and put them in the pockets of their customers is exploding. It's a breakthrough, that's the future, and every software developer sees it. ’

Matrix hides much of its inner workings under a shroud of secrecy, a strategy that helps keep the company secretive and generate a strong interest in its product launches.

But the Mphone app store relies on a large number of external developers to fill its virtual shelves, which makes it difficult for developers to stay in touch and communicate with Matrix, especially if you want your app to be visible to consumers.

Newman is known to be the best and most successful product manager Silicon Valley has ever seen, creating the remarkable product Mphone and pushing that definition to greatness in Mphone2.

He also led the creation of the Mphone App Store, and personally introduced this incredible product to developers in Silicon Valley at the Mphone Developer Conference that year.

Later results proved what Newman said at the developer conference announcing the Mphone, which was a game-changer and a radical revolution in app distribution, where consumer behavior determines what apps they see. This is another successful application of the data analysis mindset that Newman cultivated during his time at Quora.

But what's a little different is that Newman is both a rule-maker and a participant in the game, and he's a developer himself, and he's also competing for mobile apps, which some developers don't think is fair.

Matrix describes the problem differently.

I think that, in general, we don't give Newman any other company preferential treatment just because Newman is the founder and actual controller of Matrix. Schiller said: "Whether it's Riot Games forums or Flamingo Games' games on Mphone, they pay the same price for advertising as other developers to get traffic.

The reason why more and more users see the game "Legend of Heroes" is also because it has been recognized by the majority of users, rather than us pushing it to users in large quantities.

We definitely didn't give Legends of Heroes any preferential treatment just because the producer was Newman. On the contrary, in order to avoid facing similar accusations, we have eliminated some of the free advertising slots that should have been given to him. ’

Later, Schiller added: "The traffic is fake, the turnover is real, and the hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue from Legend of Heroes are enough to prove how much it is loved by users." ’

In addition to Newman, who is criticized by developers for being both a rule-maker and a participant, the censorship of the Mphone app store is also criticized by developers.

For Matrix, the review process is a necessary part. The company places a high value on what it describes as 'user trust', where users trust that apps distributed in the Mphone app store won't crash the platform, steal personal information, or contain illegal content.

Mr. Schiller said that most applications pass the review without difficulty, and those that require more rigorous scrutiny are mainly those that are slowed down by errors or glitches in the coding.

'We care a lot about feedback, whether it's good or bad,' he said. While there are some complaints, they are only a small part of what happens in the process. We receive more than 10,000 applications submitted every week. Most of them will be available on Mphone's app store within two weeks'

Of course, this brings another problem: users can't effectively browse through tens of thousands of apps to find what they don't know.

Still, Mphone's app store is significantly better than the rest, says Peter, head of marketing at San Francisco-based mobile analytics firm Flurry: Gone are the days when mobile developers had to negotiate with telcos if they wanted to publish their apps on their phones.

'It takes six to nine months to build relationships with operators, it can take two hundred and fifty thousand to build infrastructure, and telcos take a 50 percent or more cut of every dollar,' Peter said, a process that restricts access to mobile platforms. 'Matrix has helped create a healthier development environment and expanded the pie for everyone. ’

Matrix pockets 30% of the planned revenue in any Mphone app store. The 30 percent figure has been a sticking point for Newman since he started his business in Silicon Valley in 1998, from Riot's distribution channels to Quora's pay-to-answer channels.

He will not try to increase the share because of the strong position of his platform, nor will he reduce the share because his platform faces competition from strong rivals. 30% of them even became one of Newman's exclusive entries on Quora.

It is precisely because of Newman's insistence that many developers have an inexplicable trust in Newman, even if Newman receives a 30% commission, it is better than cooperating with other platforms that may change the share ratio at any time.

Internet companies and individual developers, large and small, have reached a balance with Matrix. Although the barriers to entry for software developers have dropped significantly, Peter believes that 'friction points have changed'.

The developers now cite examples of applications that have been put on hold for approval and have neither been accepted nor rejected for months. As large companies begin to mass produce projects, garage-sized establishments fear that they will be squeezed out. FreedomVoice Systems, a San Diego-based company, couldn't wait to launch a mobile version of the computer app for Mphone.

The company submitted an application to the Mphone app store last year and has been waiting, waiting, and waiting excitedly.

'We were faced with 196 days without contact with Matrix,' said Eric Thomas, CEO of FreedomVoice. The app has been pending in the Mphone app store for half a year. ’

Thomas said that he understands that it is Matrix's decision to accept his application or not. But they're not going to tell us it's no, or even why, so we can try to do something,' he said, 'and it's a very strange and bad practice.' ’

Freeverse, founded by Smith in 1994, also develops games and desktop programs for computers. But like other software developers, the company shifted its focus to Mphone as its popularity soared.

But that doesn't mean it's an easy path to riches.

"We're still seen as a newbie in terms of our size, treating this thing as a side hustle," Smith said. "The trade-off is that the barrier to entry for developers is much lower, and anyone can develop and bring mobile apps to market."

No one understands this better than Cerulean Studios, a software company based in Brookfield, Connecticut. After three months of receiving only automated responses to emails from Matrix, Cerulean finally received a call from a Matrix employee in July.

He didn't say much, he just said that our app would be available on the Mphone app store that afternoon,' recalls Scott, co-founder of Cerulean. We know what we're up against at Matrix. They want everything to work flawlessly like gears, and you have to run by their rules. ’

Some Mphone developers have tried to circumvent Matrix's policies underground so that developers can quickly release their apps on their own terms.

They tried to help users of Mphone 'jailbreak', and the devices were modified to allow anyone to upload programs to them, which Matrix said was illegal.

'Developers are just tired of the censorship process and opaque hurdles,' said Mario, who runs Rock Your Phone, an online site with a small batch of jailbroken apps.

'They've been defecting to jailbreak communities or other platforms. This demand creates a market for our products and attracts developers. Mr. Mario said, 'About 10,000 Mphones have visited his website, which is an impressive number.'

As the Mphone app store matures and Mphone2 is launched, more complex apps need to be relied upon to monetize it. It's not enough to have a great app.

Bart Dekrem, CEO of Tapulous, a startup that released music rhythm games, recalls that in the early days, developing a good app was enough.

The company's first game, Tap Tap Revenge, is available on the Mphone app store. It quickly climbed the store's charts, and Matrix eventually ranked it as the most popular free-to-play game of the quarter.

Dekerem said that this instant and relatively easy success is much less these days, as more and more companies compete in the Mphone app store. These include big game publishers like EA, Blizzard, Sony, and the company that recently released a new version of its popular video game, Rock Band.

Tapulous has already started working with record labels and musicians to launch a paid special edition Tap Tap Revenge starring big-name singers.

'Simply selling apps is ultimately not a scalable model,' he said. This has become more and more a consensus after the launch of "Legend of Heroes".

Selling apps only makes you a middle-class developer, and if you want to make a lot of money in Mphone, you still need to rely on selling services, preferably unique ones.

The success of the Mphone app store was a pleasant surprise for both Matrix and its competitors, and it spawned a new digital ecosystem. Today, hundreds of software enthusiasts, from individuals tinkering in their bedrooms late at night to established companies looking for lucrative new revenue streams, are joining the race for the Mphone app store.

Smartphone manufacturers are striving to make their platforms more attractive and profitable, bringing creativity and enthusiasm that rivals Mphone's.

It's easy to see why: While Matrix doesn't release specific financial figures for the Mphone app store, analysts estimate that it generates close to $1 billion a year in revenue for Matrix and its developers, and that number is growing rapidly. ”

(End of chapter)