I think this is rather "the internet via a browser and the internet via individual applications"

Not quite. One is Internet on your desk and the other is Internet in your pocket. It makes certain things possible that would previously make little sense. You would not tweet a video from a protest rally; you would not message or listen to podcasts or read something or do trading while commuting; online banking wouldn't be that safe and secure; you wouldn't have an interactive map in your palm while in a new city; and a thousand more things that today exist only on mobile - thanks to the compact touch interfaces and the Internet of course.

You could SMS and MMS from a protest, you could do banking with a phone call.

It's all progressive improvements. Networks converged to internet and TCP/IP while devices converged to computers everywhere with colored screens of various sizes.

> you could do banking with a phone call

Try to do what e.g. Revolut, N26 and similar apps are offering over the phone. It would take ages. This is a really bad comparison.

Sometimes progressive improvements become a breakthrough, though I wouldn't call the invention of touch UIs a progressive improvement. It was a massive one. We take it for granted today but before the release of the first iPhone very very few people would have imagined it, let alone that it could change the world (which it did).

IDK, we had Palm devices and the Treo before iPhone. Dropping the keyboard and stylus for a finger was probably inevitable.

Online banking was more secure on the desktop, IMO. Printed OTP and login/password versus the current PIN-only system my bank has inexplicably switched to for their mobile app.

All the banking apps I use provide biometrics login (opt-in), plus your mobile device is a lot more likely to be operated by you personally compared to your desktop computer. I.e. your phone in someone else's hands is an exception because it requires your permission and your biometrics, and it would be very temporary anyway. Not so with the desktop. Online banking was never as secure as it is now.

Let alone that mobile platforms being managed environments themselves are a lot more secure.

The broad unsupervised internet vs the curated and filtered app store.

The user experience limited by the browser vs the user experience (less) limited by native platform APIs.