Happy birthday, iPhone!

Today marks the 10th birthday of the iPhone! My, how much has changed in a single decade… This blog deals with all things async, and the iPhone has been an important part of async adoption.

What does the iPhone have to do with async?

Glad you asked!

The adoption of async has accelerated considerably over the last few years, with no seeming end in sight. I’ve discussed this phenomenon several times in a couple of my talks, and I’m recording a more permanent discussion of it that will be released shortly.

To put it simply, async is all about freeing up threads. This results in two major benefits: on the server side, async frees up request threads so that the server can scale further (and faster) while requiring fewer resources; on the client side, async frees up the UI thread so that it can remain responsive to the user.

Finally, there have been two broad changes in the types of software being written. The first is cloud computing, which gives direct financial benefits to servers that require fewer resources - an ideal scenario for async adoption.

The second is mobile applications. Unlike traditional desktop apps, mobile apps must be responsive to the user - an ideal scenario for async adoption.

These two movements - cloud computing and mobile - have encouraged async adoption to move at a faster rate than it could have otherwise.

So, happy birthday, iPhone, and thanks for all you’ve done!