The original iPhone didn't have an app store, apps were supposed to be web apps.
If you're going to rewrite history, at least do it well.
I get it, you're a techie, just like me. I use Android, I don't like iOS.
But to deny that for the average person the iPhone was the first usable smartphone is just silly at this point.
Navigating a 2D space with my fingers, just dragging around or pinching to zoom, is also much, much faster and more convenient faster than than doing the same with arrow keys (again, either physical or on-display ones).
And navigating through the OS and apps, either through lists and 2D spaces (websites, images, maps, videos, etc.) is a lot more common than copying files around on phones. 100:1, probably. Again, some techie/advanced functionality was lost at the start, but the time and frustration savings from those basic yet intuitive features heavily outweighed their loss.
If you don't agree with this, I guess you either haven't tried pre-iPhone smartphones or you just have a very unorthodox opinion and I'm not very keen to continue this conversation.
pinch to zoom doesn't interfere in any way with easy app installation or easy files transfer, they can coexist (and they do, on android), sync simply doesn't work when you want to quickly drop that one specific file and keep moving, sync doesn't work when one device has much bigger storage than the other, sync doesn't work when you want to easily remove files from one device
"paradigm shift" to golden cage is not a good thing, apple intended to take all responsibility from users but at a cost of being unable to do anything efficiently