Apple did a lot to start to bring the US up to speed with the rest of the world in terms of mobile technology, yes, and it certainly deserves praise for the success that the iPhone has been, but what Apple provided was a usable platform. "Smartphones" before then had been slow, ugly, generally not that sexy, and it's hard to excite people about your mobile software when they aren't even excited about their hardware. The iPhone did do a lot to help bring mobile software to the average consumer, but the notion that it did it in a vacuum is silly. There were lots of technologies that paved the way for the iPhone to be a success before it. Apple did not singlehandedly invent the concept of the smartphone, nor was it the first to introduce usable mobile computing platforms to consumers. RIM was doing that long before Apple ever had a thought of entering the mobile game.<p>The author simultaneously praises Apple for the single-handed creation/salvation of an entire industry, and then turns around and says "Android's only great because it's stood on the shoulders of giants". Boy, that's a convenient bit of selective application of history.<p>> Yes, Apple has rejected some apps for seemingly arbtrary or selfish reasons and imposed aggressive controls on developers. But the iPhone also paved the way for Android and a new wave of handset development. The people griping about Apple’s "closed system" are generally people who are new to the industry and didn’t realize how bad it was before.<p>Now this is just silly. The people that gripe about Apple's "closed system" are people who know how bad it was, and are frustrated that Apple is repeating many of the "closed system" problems that made mobile software so terrible in the first place. The iPhone is a marvelous device, but it's completely disingenuous to praise the iPhone for bringing accessibility to a "closed market" and then in the same breath to hand-wave its own closed nature away. It's better than the previous iterations; that doesn't make its iteration "best". The people who are frustrated with the closed nature of the platform are people who have tasted how good an accessible platform can be, and who are frustrated at the roadblocks that Apple has placed in their way.<p>I love the iPhone - it's a marvelous piece of hardware, and I absolutely acknowledge that it thoroughly changed the landscape of mobile consumer computing in the US, but I own an Android phone because Apple's policies make me hesitate to buy into a platform that is locked down and guarded by one man's whims, or to financially support a company that is so xenophobic and who actively and aggressively stifles competition. I own an Android phone not because I forget how bad older-school mobile software was (to write, distribute, obtain, run, the whole pipeline), but because I remember clearly how bad the old system was, and to have a phone in my hand that I can do just nearly anything I want with is a very welcome relief and advancement from the mobile platforms of yore.