The app store existed long before the iPhone, and Apple couldn't own the name
Apple made the phrase famous in 2008, but a program called the Electronic AppWrapper was selling software as a digital catalogue in 1992, and one issue was shown to Steve Jobs at a NeXT trade show. Years later Apple tried to claim app store as its own trademark and lost.
Buying software down a wire is older still. In the early 1980s subscription bulletin boards such as Micronet 800 let users browse and download programs for machines from Acorn, Commodore, Sinclair and others, paying per minute of connection and sometimes per title. The Electronic AppWrapper went further, bundling encryption and digital rights management, at a time when most people still got software on floppy disks or CD-ROMs.
Phones followed. In 1998 an Indian firm launched Palmix, a web shop for Palm, Windows CE and Psion handhelds. In 1999 NTT DoCoMo's i-mode became the first integrated app store for mobile phones and took off in Japan, partly because creators could keep up to 91% of revenue. The T-Mobile Sidekick got a catalogue called Download Fun in 2003 that billed purchases to the phone bill and let outside developers build Java apps, and Nokia opened its own storefront for Symbian phones in 2006.
In the Linux world, package managers such as Debian's APT had long handled installing, updating and removing software, including tracking what depends on what, but without payments. Linspire's Click'N'Run added one-click installs of free and paid programs in 2002 for a yearly fee, and Ubuntu's Software Center began selling some apps in 2010.
Apple's App Store arrived with iPhone OS 2.0 in July 2008, opening the phone to outside developers and becoming a huge earner despite criticism. It also made app store a generic term. Apple filed to register the phrase in 2008 and in 2011 sued Amazon and GetJar over their use of it. In January 2013 a US district court rejected the claims against Amazon, finding no evidence of imitation, and Apple dropped the case that July.
Source: App store
