> Everyone knew Android was supposed to be the response to google having to keep stashes of j2me devices in drawers, which is ironically what everyone ended up needing to do with Android devices.

It was still a better situation. An Android app might need tweaks but at least you're dealing with the same SDK/API (maybe with proprietary extensions?)

Those J2ME phones felt like you needed to start from basically scratch for each phone model.

Windows Mobile phones had apps distributed by wherever, you could go get them on a CD from Bestbuy if you wanted.

> I was working in mobile games at the time and ended up working with Google on the Play Store launch, among other things.

Well, mobile games are distributed via ads, not the "stores."

I don't know. This distribution, network effects story. It's sort of, whatever. People were using chat apps then, and people are using chat apps now. The iOS App Store and Google Play are such shit shows, they are glorified installation wizards for 99.9% of people. Whether you have to install-wizard via sideloading or via a deep link or whatever, it's not super material nor revolutionary. I think this comes from conflating Steam with the App Store, ultimately Steam is a real, bonafide store, and the mobile app stores are more like technical restrictions that someone is using to take a 30% cut of revenues. Which is what everyone is saying anyway.

> Windows Mobile phones had apps distributed by wherever, you could go get them on a CD from Bestbuy if you wanted.

This was also the case for Palm smartphones. Since they were an amalgam of a Palm PDA and a cell phone, they kept the app model of Palm PDAs. IIRC, you could even transfer apps from one Palm PDA to another through their infrared port, or through Bluetooth if both were fancy ones.

I think a lot of people forget that the iPhone was not the first smart phone. I was downloading apps, checking email, and sending IMs over the AIM network with Verichat on my Treo 650 well before the iPhone was a thing.

+1. I've done the same with SymbianOS.

The two huge innovations of the iPhone were decent web browsing (I had a Treo, it sucked for the web) and the multitouch screen with corresponding gestures. Nobody else was doing anything like this yet, and I remember this being the thing that blew everyone away at the keynote.

Multi-touch was such an enabler, because it meant you could do an on-screen keyboard properly, which meant you could replace the physical keyboard with more screen.

I remember everyone scoffing at the "lol you can't type on it" dramatically missing this point.

Also the keyboard wasn't.stuck with QWERTY! You could swap keyboards. You could have big numbers when typing phone numbers, and letters when texting. You could type Californian street names correctly! Write math! Etc.

Yeah. By our own metrics, the first iPhone wasn’t even a smartphone because it couldn’t load apps.

Even back then, people were exactly clear on those two things being the true revolution of the iPhone.

I remembered it the way you told it.