You would be forgiven for thinking that mobile spy software has been around since God was a boy. Considering the rate of change since the Internet took over our lives, one could argue that you are right!
The reality, however, is that it’s only been ten years since the world first saw a commercial service allowing you to spy on a mobile becoming available on a subscription business model. That’s a pretty cheeky concept when you think about it 😉
So for those of you who stay awake at night asking questions like “what’s the history of mobile spy software,” this article is for you.
We did a little research and then compiled an infographic showing the emergence of the major players in the spyphone business, and a chronology of the release our products.
Here’s How We Did It.
We established the date of the establishment of spyphone vendors from the release of their websites because that’s when they could actually sell anything.
Our first step was to look at the domain research website to get the date of the domain name registration – but domain registration alone is only a part of the story because a site can lay dormant or the registration may predate the current owner’s involvement.
So we also took a look at the WayBack Machine (http://archive.org/web/), an online archive listing over 360 billion entries going back to 1996. The WayBack Machine crawls websites all over the Internet at periodic intervals, documenting and archiving historical points in time.
This gives us a snapshot of how long a company or a website has actually been around, and sometimes what they were doing at a specific period. WayBack Machine features a calendar display of individual capture dates.
You’ll notice FlexiSPY predates all of the competition, and we are proud to have inspired so many imitators – after all, it’s the ultimate flattery. Yet being the oldest or original does not guarantee anything, but our offer to buy back a competitor’s product surely speaks for itself.
