Because 7 burned the app bridge with 6.5, thus making it ever easier for someone to justify moving to a different platform.
Never mind that at launch iphone was more fancy featurephone than smartphone.
Not really. iPhone was the first phone ever that shipped with a real, full-featured, non-crippled web browser. This was an astonishing achievement at the time, and one which made its existing competition look like "fancy featurephones," not the reverse. (Really an astonishing achievement period, considering it had 128MB of RAM).
Yes, Walter Isaacson said that others tried to convince Steve about apps at launch, but from the moment he started talking about web apps on that stage in 2007, I never believed for a moment it was really the angle. I knew a couple folks who worked on the first couple revs of iOS, installable apps were always possible, if underdeveloped, from day one. Jobs had lots of resources at Apple in the 80s, and frittered them away on the Lisa and Apple III. He stumbled on Pixar, not knowing where it would go, and had a hell of a time figuring out how to position NeXT, but all those failures taught him that in business, like in art (and we know he felt himself an artist), making the most within the constraints of the medium is they key to success. He came back to Apple on its deathbed. He negotiated with MS for a transfusion to stay alive, and knew even though OS9 sucked, they needed a splash. They had the iMac. Pare down a personal computer to what was needed at the time. Monitor, modem/ethernet, CD drive. No need for a floppy, they're dying, chuck it for an external one you can charge for. No need to pack it with a super spiffy CPU or oodles of RAM, people can pay for an upgrade. Just make it slick looking and work well. Same with the iPod. Pimp it out with upgrades later, after the MVP proves its worth. The G4 cube failed, it never was really iterated on.
He learned from Microsoft, create a MVP, if it seems to catch on, iterate fast.
Barely any platform had 3rd party apps. No one had a streamlined app store, SDK and monetization process like iOS came out with in 2008.
In iOS 2.0 they introduced a new feature that allows you to save web pictures to Photos. Full-feature redefined. :)
Edit: a full-featured television indeed, by Alan Kay's definition: https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay-thinks-ab...
A full-fledged browser experience in 2007 to me means at least I could have mouse hover, to deal with sites not yet adapting to mobile computing (there were a lot of them). WM6 browsers did that. If it fails, I'd go and use my Palm device to VNC into my workstation -- a 2004 Sony device that will be up-to-date forever because it is a decent thin client.
I also remember opera mini being a very handy browser on lower end phones like the S40 models. Since the first iOS safari does not do javascript IIRC, it makes no difference if the rendering is done with WebKit locally, or pre-computed on a server. The only difference is that iPhone has a bigger viewport, which allows you to consider the webpage a minified version of the desktop rendering -- and you are able to freely swipe, zoom, rotate -- not relating to the functionality of the browser itself. I'm not sure if you would agree, but I think, if iPhone1 runs Opera Mobile (with beefy 128MB RAM and fancy graphics chip), it beats the built-in Safari to the ground.
Of course it will cause other troubles -- battery life, thermal management, slow startup, or even unstability etc. This is, to my understanding, why Apple decided to ship a "reduced" version of Safari3.
Edit: adding explainations.
I would have to disagree with that statement. Windows Mobile and BlackBerry allowed 3rd party apps to be installed, but they were both difficult to find and didn't usually add anything beneficial to the phones at the time. Users, for the most part, stuck to what was installed on the phone and that was it. Smartphones were defined by the fact they had an email client and a (relative to the time) high-resolution screen to read and write emails on.
It was a different market in 2007. The idea that a successful smartphone required an app ecosystem was unheard of.
What the iPhone did was genius: they created demand for the phone, but would only sell through phone companies willing to let Apple control the app market. That made all the difference: all of sudden, a developer could make an app and have it show up to bazillions of people.
[disclaimer: I currently work for Microsoft, but not in the phone team. But I do have apps in the Microsoft app store!]
There were many companies living on this stuff. Mobile data was still very expensive, which didn't change for a few more years, and touchscreens were small and crappy. So the market was mostly business logic and CRM apps because they were the ones that could afford it.
That changed when mobile data and big screens became cheap enough for consumers, but I think Apple was as confused about that as everyone else given the state of early iPhones.
You're 100% right, MS beat MS.