> from software they have contributed nothing to
They literally invented smart phones and app stores, and continuously release new hardware with software APIs that enable the apps.
They literally invented smart phones and app stores, and continuously release new hardware with software APIs that enable the apps.
iPhone was announced in January 2007 and shipped in June 2007.
Windows Mobile literally had a version called "Smartphone 2002" which you should be able to guess when that came out. You could buy a variety of devices in a vertical mostly-screen format running Windows Mobile for years before iPhone was even getting hinted at.
The main thing the original iPhone did for the smartphone market is popularizing capacitive multitouch screens that work well without a stylus.
> and app stores
The iPhone not only launched without an app store, Apple (and Jobs in particular) was famously hostile to the idea of even supporting third party native apps at all, insisting that web apps would be all that the platform needed. They didn't change their tune until October 2007 when they announced an upcoming SDK, it was made available to developers in March 2008, and it wasn't actually released to users until July 2008.
One could make an argument for Linux package managers being an "app store" in the mid-90s, though if you insist on it needing to sell commercial software then the various carrier-specific software platforms for J2ME feature phones starting in the '99-00 timeframe would be it. Carrier-agnostic third-party stores started to pop up a few years later, and the first official one from a phone vendor seems to have been Nokia Catalogs for Symbian S60 in 2006.
Android also had an app store from the beginning, but the launch of the whole platform was delayed long enough that Apple managed to get iOS 2.0 out with its app store before the first Android devices actually shipped.
...and you could use that on Openmoko smartphones before Apple's App Store already.
There is a good argument to be made that Apple introduced the modern smartphone (Android switched to multitouch and a virtual keyboard in response to the iPhone[1]) and app store ecosystem.
It is an extraordinary achievement, especially considering the skepticism expressed by dominant incumbents such as Nokia, Blackberry, Palm, etc. in 2007. iPhone would, at best, have less impact than Windows Mobile.
[1] https://simpleprogrammer.com/history-internet-part-15-androi...
Windows Mobile and Handango[0] would like a word with you.
LOL! Crawl back to your cult