I owned several Windows Mobile phones, one Blackberry, and one Palm device before iPhone and Android came out. I know the history. They were not popular devices. Even just looking at Blackberry sales by themselves, sales of these devices pre-iPhone were absolutely insignificant [1].

Same thing with email. Hotmail/Yahoo/AOL pre-dated Gmail by quite a long time, but Gmail now owns something like 80% of all webmail traffic.

I think your confusion might be where I said "these things existed but no one really liked them" maybe you read "these things didn't exist before"?

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/266240/global-revenue-of...