Happy 10th Birthday iPhone

Apple device has been a game changer for business world

If Silicon Valley and other startup hotbeds like Pittsburgh had a dictionary, there would be one term highlighted, bolded and starred: “disruption.”

And with that definition of disruption, there’d be a huge photo of the Apple iPhone next to it because in the 10 short years since the blocky, early-stage smartphone was developed on June 29, 2007, it has dramatically altered the way businesses operate.

From affordable options for mom-and-pop shops’ to accept plastic payment to the mobility of the internet and a shift toward application-based businesses, Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple Inc. has forever changed the digital landscape with a swipe on a touchscreen.

Much of what the iPhone, along with its trickle-down effect into other industries, has accomplished involves ease of use, mobility and the availability of a base platform, said Peter Boatwright, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business.

“Of course, we can attribute major [retail] disruption to Amazon, but even that needs a platform and technology,” he said. “It’s a question of the chicken and egg. Who came first?”

That codependency, Mr. Boatwright said, means mammoth companies like Amazon may not have thrived without the mobility

the iPhone presented in 2007. With just a quick download, an entire online market is available to consumers.

The tablet industry, which has been expedited by the widespread use of the iPhone and the iPad, has facilitated non-cash payments for small businesses as more shoppers opt to use cards.

According to a 2014 report from Total System Services, a credit card service company, 43 percent of Americans preferred to pay with debit cards; 35 percent opted for credit cards; and just 9 percent selected cash in the online survey of 1,000 consumers.

While the iPad is the historical pioneer in tablets with its revolutionary iOS operating system, the market has opened the door to the likes of Amazon’s Kindle Fire, Google’s Nexus and the Samsung Galaxy Tab, among countless other Android-powered tablets.

At Black Forge Coffee House in Allentown, which employs three people, coowner Nick Miller said the company uses an Androidpowered tablet with a Square credit card processing system to handle debit and credit transactions, along with Apple Pay and Android Pay — two digital payment options, among others.

“You’ll find a lot of modern companies use those and a lot of food trucks use them because they can work wirelessly with mobile data,” he said.

Square provides most hardware for free, he said, although the chip reader costs $50 flat.

Service fees are about 2.5 percent per transaction. Mr. Miller noted that the minimum bill for a card is $1, and that there’s virtually no product in the store under that price.

“I feel like it helps a lot. ... We don’t have an ATM on the premises, and if we did our customers would be charged extra money,” he said. “I’m not a big fan of doing that.”

Meanwhile, the opensource community is thriving.

“Consumer-generated content is a huge force in retailing,” Mr. Boatwright said. “We might not necessarily attribute that to smartphones, directly, but those reviews affect [consumer] choices and they get them on their phones.”

That means marketing has been forced to adapt over time, due to the emphasis on mobile — and competition is at its height.

“You hear stories all the time of people in a store looking for a price check,” Mr. Boatwright said. “[The stores] just plan that a customer is doing price checks. ... They know they have to match other’s online pricing.”

The iPhone’s mobile disruption also benefits organizations outside the retail sphere.

The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust developed ParkPGH in 2010 as a smart parking solution that delivers realtime parking space availability for Pittsburgh garages located in the Cultural District, the Central Business District and the North Shore.

Over 200,000 people use that app each year, according to Marc Fleming, vice president of marketing and communications at the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust. “Eighty percent of that comes from mobile,” he said.

According to the Association for Competitive Technology’s 2017 State of the App Economy report, mobile applications comprise a $143 billion ecosystem, which has created at least 110,000 software engineering jobs.

That has been an attractive prospect for investors who look at companies for mobile-first applications, said Jim Jen, executive director of the East Libertybased accelerator AlphaLab.

“A question startups have always had to answer is ‘What is your mobile strategy?’” Mr. Jen said.

“Even if a startup’s initial product is not a mobile app, it should be thinking about its mobile strategy.”