1) it offered full web browser experience. No one had done this in a phone yet. They also banned flash from day 1 and favoured development using standard web technologies. The side benefit from all of this is that the data demands crippled our cellular networks and forced major infrastructure upgrades :)
2) Apple took control out of the carriers hands. By standardizing on the web, no more special+favoured applications! Just load a web page :)
Your claim is false. When Apple made the decision to not allow Adobe Flash on iOS, there was no App Store. Apple did not allow third-party apps, and writing HTML5 was the only way for any third party to run anything on iOS.
That changed later, and clearly Apple enjoys the 30% now, but the grandparent comment is 100% accurate, and your first three sentences are 100% false.
This is cherry-picking articles to create a false timeline. The iPhone never supported Flash. There was never a "Flash ban" so much as there was never Flash.
I think that by "Flash ban" Dotnaught means "Apple's ban on third party development tools" which was specifically intended to ban the iOS packager tool Adobe had started shipping.
All of the earlier smartphones had applications. I had a real player app and a better video recorder for my Symbian phone; blackberry, windows (CE), and palm phones all had apps too.
Mobile Safari was certainly a lot better than browsers on the other phones though. And a lack of carrier garbage and interference on updates was also nice.
Yes, but they're just thin wrappers around iOS' WebView; they don't use the Gecko or Blink engines. Apple doesn't allow other browser engines on the App Store.
Wasn't the iPhone in USA exclusive to one carrier for, like, a decade? Meanwhile in the rest of the world carriers never really had any power over how we used our devices or what was on them.
1) it offered full web browser experience. No one had done this in a phone yet. They also banned flash from day 1 and favoured development using standard web technologies. The side benefit from all of this is that the data demands crippled our cellular networks and forced major infrastructure upgrades :)
2) Apple took control out of the carriers hands. By standardizing on the web, no more special+favoured applications! Just load a web page :)