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Comment by sillyfluke | Hacker News Reader

It didn't take mobile apps with the launch of the iPhone 20 years to add to the economy though, did it?

The iPhone was not the first mobile device or even the first smartphone. Not to mention it did not support mobile applications as we know them today.

That seems a tad reductionist. Why not just say the iPhone was completely inconsequential because afterall it's simply another "computer". Why not go even back further and start the timer at the first physical implementation of a Turing machine?

The iPhone killer UX + App store release can be directly traced to the growth in tech in the subsequent years its release.

I think it would have happened regardless - late Symbian from Nokia was pretty close and Maemo was already a thing with N900 not that far off in the future, not to mention Android.

We might have been possibly better of actually, with the Apple walled garden abominations and user device lockdowns not being dragged into the mainstream.

As someone who worked for Nokia around the iPhone launch (on map search, not phones directly) - I also wanted to believe this at the time. But in retrospect, it feels like what actually mattered was that capacitive multi-touch screens were the only non-garbage interface, and only Apple bought FingerWorks...

Not clear that this is a helpful interpretation, other than "we're in the primordial ooze stage and the thing that matters will be something none of the current players have", but that's hard to take to the bank :-)

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