In the mid-2000s the smartphone market was crowded and fragmented. Nokia’s Symbian dominated worldwide volume, Research In Motion’s BlackBerry owned the corporate email user, Microsoft had Windows Mobile, and Palm carried the legacy of the early PDA. None of these had a runaway lead, and the phone was still treated mostly as a communications device with software bolted on. The competition that followed would collapse this whole field down to two survivors.
The turning point was Apple’s announcement on January 9, 2007. In its press release, “Apple Reinvents the Phone with iPhone,” Apple described combining “three products, a revolutionary mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet communications device,” into one device, controlled by “a large multi-touch display and pioneering new software” that let users “control iPhone with just their fingers.” Steve Jobs’s framing, that Apple was going to “reinvent the phone,” signaled a shift from keypads and styluses to full touchscreens and real software. Google’s Android, which arrived on devices in 2008 as an open platform any manufacturer could ship, took the same touchscreen-and-apps model and spread it across the rest of the industry.
The decisive weapon was the app store. Once Apple opened the App Store in 2008 and Google launched its equivalent, the value of a phone became the software you could install on it. Developers wrote for the two platforms with the most users, which brought more apps, which attracted more users, a self-reinforcing loop. The older platforms could not match the app catalogs, and their development models, built before this app-store world, looked dated almost overnight.
One by one the rivals fell. Palm’s webOS, despite a well-regarded design, was shut down after Hewlett-Packard acquired and then abandoned it. Symbian was wound down as Nokia bet its future elsewhere. BlackBerry’s market share collapsed and the company eventually moved to building Android phones before exiting hardware entirely. Microsoft made the most expensive attempt to remain a third platform, buying Nokia’s phone business and pushing Windows Phone and then Windows 10 Mobile, but it never reached the app support or sales volume needed to compete.
Microsoft’s own surrender is documented in plain language. In its lifecycle announcement, Microsoft stated that “Windows 10 Mobile, version 1709 (released October 2017) is the last release of Windows 10 Mobile and Microsoft will end support on December 10, 2019,” and in its guidance for affected users it recommended that “customers move to a supported Android or iOS device.” When the company that owned the PC operating system told its remaining phone users to switch to its two competitors, the platform war was effectively over. The result was a durable duopoly: iOS and Android, between them, run nearly every smartphone in use, a concentration of power that shaped everything from app distribution to the economics of the entire mobile industry.