No reconciliation is necessary. Before the iPhone, phones were a closed platform. You couldn't get your software onto cellphones without going thru the carrier. There was no "app Store", there was no such thing as an app. You needed millions of dollars, to be a big business, to have special contracts or all of the above in order for carriers to even take your meeting to see if they'd think about putting your software on "their" phones.

The iPhone opened all that up. Anyone could write software, and provided it was minimally useful and didn't contain malware, sell it in the store. Any consumer could, for the first time, install software on their phones that they chose, rather than having it chosen for them.