busted loop

The term "mobile app" is starting to become commonplace. I can use it with my dad and he knows what I mean. People have heard enough in the press and done enough shopping in the iTunes store to get the idea of buying software for a cell phone. But will Apple, who indirectly coined the term "podcast" with their omnipresent iPod, do the same thing with the iPhone?

Here you can see that people started looking around for information about mobile apps back in the middle of 2007.

Zero to 6.00 in two years, looks like pretty serious popularity growth.

It's important to always get some context, so I picked the first other term that came to mind.

Apparently if I'd been using the term "iPhone app" instead my dad would have understood me a lot sooner.

Here's a graph with iphone, palm, and android apps for the past 30 days:

Getting back to the original question of "iphone" becoming the "Q-tips®" of mobile, here's one last search trend for you to ponder:

This doesn't necessarily mean anything, but google trends is fun to play with.