[tonywastaken]

Danger also had a pretty nice App Store model and a nice developer and user community in their phpBB forums. The carriers that supported the Hiptop also had a hosted web interface where you could manage your email, calendar, notes, etc.

[latchkey]

I'm friends with a few of the super early Danger employees. My buddy and I were trying to use that opportunity to get our app into that store. At the time, you kind of needed to know someone on the inside to get listed on stores, especially if your app wasn't a game or ringtone.

We built a small and simple bartender app that had a UX almost exactly like the hiptop address book. You could easily look up recipes for drinks and then we'd let you build a shopping list. It was a fun exercise that was about a month of development time for the both of us. Mostly, it was just cleaning up the recipe data and adding a few drinks on our own.

It turns out that T-Mobile wouldn't list the app because they didn't have the ability to make sure that everyone using the app was 21+. We fought with this for months over it and eventually gave up. It was a really frustrating experience.

Apple came along with the iPhone and their own store model and while people used to complain heavily about it, I kept thinking at least it wasn't T-Mobile.

By the way, the VM was the precursor to Dalvik, which eventually turned into what is now Android...

https://medium.com/@chrisdesalvo/the-future-that-everyone-fo...

[yafbum]

That hosted web interface even got famously hacked by a teenager then posted screenshots of Paris Hilton's info https://www.computerworld.com/article/2569592/paris-hilton-m...