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Crazes come and crazes go. I saw the Coming of Pikachu; I witnessed the Dawn of the Rubik’s Cube. I was there at the Zenith of the Hula-hoop; I wept at the Fall of the Pog.

Passing trends and fads share an unfathomable diversity, from small yellow Japanese monsters, to 3-D mechanical puzzles. Even at the height of their fame, they may still circumvent the masses, but their cult-like followings generate an insane amount of revenue for their makers, and all who can ride on the tsunami of popularity.

The hot topic at the moment is the ‘app’, a shortening of ‘application’, meaning, in computing terms, a program with the purpose of supporting or improving the software user’s work. Applications are nothing new – we all use them in our day to day lives, from word processors to web browsers; spreadsheets to media players. However, the re-branding of the humble application has created a whole new market, bringing with it the lucrative coverage of the worldwide press and a deluge of free advertising.

Facebook are perhaps responsible for bringing ’apps’ to the attention of the mainstream media with ‘Scrabulous’, the rights-infringing derivative of Hasbro’s famous board game. That legal dispute led to many a news story, in which the description of the term ‘app’ received nearly as much page space as the wranglings between the two companies. In an effort to explain the term to their readership, a new buzzword was created, leaving other companies eager to piggyback on the intense media spotlight. Desperate to clutter their already slapdash pages with applications of their own, social networking rivals Myspace followed with such delights as ‘Own Your Friends’, an application which managed to express your unpopularity as a monetary value.

Then came the company who are proven experts at convincing the public that they have created the next big thing, when in reality they have simply stuck an apple logo on an existing product…and possibly an ‘I’ in front of its existing name. Not content with having already reinvented the MP3 player, providing us with a pricier, less-consumer-friendly equivalent product, Apple were looking for something more. Their newest offering, the I-Phone was garnering the usual support from their loyal fans, but it didn’t offer anything to extend that appeal. In short, it didn’t have scope to pull in revenue.

Apple no doubt analysed the success of the I-Pod, noting how the DRM of the I-Tunes store provided the company with a captive audience. This meant that sales of the unit itself were ultimately only a secondary concern – it was the add-on sales that followed which were more important. The problem was, how to extend this to a phone? I-Texts, a proprietary texting system which would require another I-Phone to decode? I-Speak, an Apple-users secret language, requiring the download of the I-Dictionary?

Then came the answer in a flash of blinding media inspiration – cue, The Apps Store.

The Apps Store has, overnight, become the marketing face of the I-Phone, promoting the gadget with its own sickeningly smug advert. ‘Want to split a bill? There’s an app for that’. ‘Want to put up a shelf? There’s an app for that’. ‘Want to work out how many £3.99 apps you’ve downloaded, used once, and will never use again? There’s even an app for that.’

It is worth remembering at this point that each app sold lines the pockets of Steve Jobs, a man who has made many question their inclusion on the organ donor register. When you are shaking your I-Phone and watching a pair of computer animated breasts jiggle, consider that those I-Boobs are shaking another couple of cents into an already bootylicious $5.1 billion bank account. Whilst Apple may suggest that the store exists for purely altruistic reasons, financial institutions have suggested that it has the potential to rake in another $1 billion a year for the company.

Of course, apps on mobiles are nothing new – my first mobile phone had an in-built app some fifteen years ago. It was called ‘calculator’ and I never used it once. But, you may ask, could it split a bill? Yes, it was a calculator. Could it go on to work out the tip? Yes, it was a calculator. Could it work out how many friends had left the table whilst you dragged and dropped their respective eating histories around a touchscreen? Why yes, for it was a calculator.

More important still, those figures could also be processed by other means, other non-electronic means – means which we have had at our disposal long before the invention of the mobile phone and its all pervasive apps. Personally, if I want to split a bill, I use that piece of grey matter between my ears. There is downloadable content for it too – it can be found in books and on the internet, and it is installed via a process known as ‘learning’. As WAP and the mobile internet spelled an end of the humble pub quiz, perhaps the dawn of the mobile app will eventually go one step further, and serve to curb human progress and evolution altogether. Once the app is released to regulate your breathing patterns, get ready for the T-1000’s, because the war will already have been lost.