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Comment by JohnMakin | Hacker News Reader

so I’ll hope you’ll forgive me 2 years then on my “decade” statement which was not meant as literally as you took it.

There were mobile phones before the iphone. Like a whole ecosystem even! They even had screens! and browsers! and internet!

the major innovation the iphone brought was a touch screen (and a decent camera), which sort of existed, but nothing as smooth and crisp as the iphone. please i really hope people out there dont think the iphone was the invention of the cell phone.

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Parent didn't say "mobile was invented", said "the mobile boom" - which indeed didn't really happen until (a few years) after the iPhone arrived. The amount of money flowing into mobile software is now an order of magnitude (or more) higher than it was in 2007. I'm your average Apple hater, but without them forcibly removing carriers from the software landscape, today we'd have a much smaller mobile market.

It's like differentiating between "the Internet boom" and the invention of networking - nobody is saying the 14k modem was the invention of networking, but there was no "internet boom" before it.

What about the App Store? I never used a Symbian phone but I don’t remember a device that would have allowed as much as the iPhone in the way of custom apps.

I used the hell out of Symbian. There were stores and telcos would sell apps too. Games were far better on Symbian because it wasn't a touch screen, it was practically a joystick. We had chat apps and dating apps. I was a thirsty college guy who spent a lot of data on these apps but eventually settled for SMS because data was too expensive. Web experiences sucked; my first job was converting websites to jQuery mobile, which later became obselete thanks to responsive websites.

But you can't build a business like Uber on Symbian. The iPhone brought about all these marketplace apps. They stopped being toys, and became more like mini computers.

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