Comment by detourdog
What I find interesting about your comment is that iPhone launched with out an ecosystem and 4 years later a. App Store was tabled stakes.
What I find interesting about your comment is that iPhone launched with out an ecosystem and 4 years later a. App Store was tabled stakes.
Apples app store was 3 years old at that point and white hot. The Samsung Galaxy was 2 years old then. If they wanted to go to market with an unpolished product differentiated with a few nifty features, they'd need to spend months paying loads of money to devs to fill out their app store to have a chance.
And Apple only sold 10 million iPhones the first year out of 1 billion phones that were sold that year. Jobs himself publicly stated his goal was 1% of the cell phone market the guest year
The iPhone opened up the smartphone market to many many more people.
We had smartphones before, but it didn't need to convert their tiny userbase to be a success (and I know some people who stuck with PocketPC-based smartphones for quite a while, because they had their use cases and workflows on them that other smartphones took time to cover).
Once the smartphone for everyone was a category, it was much more fighting between platforms than grabbing users that weren't considering a smartphone before. And after the initial rush that takes much more time to convince people to swap, and obviously app support etc is directly compared. (e.g. for me personally, Nokias Lumia line looked quite interesting at some point. But I wasn't the type to buy a new phone every year, by the time I was actually planning to replacing the Android phone I had it was already clear they'd stop supporting Windows Phone)