The carriers dictated the phones you could buy (in the US). They dictated the siftware on them. They dictated the interfaces. If they didn’t like a feature hey turned it off. I remember a camera phone that had Bluetooth support for sending files but Verizon turned it off because it competed with their expensive MMS service.
I remember paying $5 for a terrible version of Bejeweled. I remember Sprint wanting to charge me $4 A MONTH to have Tetris on my RAZR.
Android still suffers the crapware and delayed updates. Maybe Google’s latest attempt will finally fix that.
But the iPhone RULED over the cell companies. They did what APPLE wanted because Apple held all the power.
Verizon couldn’t tell you which games you could buy from the App Store. AT&T couldn’t make you use their email client. You never saw a Sprint branded browser or video startup screen. They were largely irrelevant. They were demoted to what they truely are: infrastructure.
Does anyone want to go back to the world where carriers had 100% of the power over phones?
What a difference that made. And I do wonder if anyone else could have ever done that. Apple had the right product at the right time (AT&T losing bad) to get enough leverage to do it.