[TrainedMonkey]

I agree that in general situations are quite similar, however there are few differences:

1. PC never had a singular point of access to nearly all available applications. Play store makes it easy to download/install or distribute a new application making it instantly available to large amount of people.

2. It is fairly easy following a tutorial to create a new mobile app. This combined with 1 makes it easy even for relatively inexperienced people to make apps that reach wide audience.

3. Rigidity of mobile environment. On PC if something goes wrong you have a chance to figure it out and correct a problem. This is much harder on mobile, often times only thing you could do is complain to the developer.

4. No POSIX. On PC if you need an app to work across a wide array of software and hardware configurations POSIX got your back. Granted, this is a weaker point because it would work only on a limited set of operating systems that are POSIX compatible.

5. You can install almost any app from play store on nearly any android device. You can't install mac os app on windows.

[pjmlp]

1. Magazines with tapes, floppies, CDs, DVDs

2. BASIC, Logo, Hypercard, ...

3. Fail to see the difference

4. POSIX only covers a tiny bit of OS portability and even POSIX leaves the little bit it covers with lots of vendor specific behaviors

5. You can install any Mac app on any Mac, any Amiga app on any Amiga, any PC app on any PC, ...

[bane]

6. The 8-bit microcomputer madness. How many pieces of software were ported to half a dozen or more platforms?