How the Custom Ringtone Industry Paved the Way for the App Store — and Then Vanished
Why I miss Crazy Frog
Before the iPhone, Venmo, or Spotify, there were ringtones. You might remember them fondly as those lo-fidelity sounds we used to communicate our highly refined music tastes every time someone called our cell. But ringtones were so much more than that. A billion-dollar industry silenced seemingly overnight, ringtones laid the foundations of modern mobile consumer technology and set the stage for the app store and mobile commerce as we know it today. And they are proof that even silly-seeming products can have an impact long after their memory fades away.
The rise of the ringtone
The first mobile phone call was not made by a silk-shirted Miami cocaine dealer in the ’80s, but by a driver in St. Louis in 1946 from a heavyweight wireless system installed in an automobile. It took another 40 years to make mobile phones portable, reliable, and affordable enough (relatively speaking) to offer to the mainstream consumer.
