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Objective C wasn't really a big thing before the iPhone. I know MacOS used it but its not like it had the rich open source community that Java had, and most iOS developers were learning it for the first time. I think this failure wasn't about programming languages; if the platform had succeeded then C# would have been just that much more popular.

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There was a it significant first moved advantage for iPhone. For a couple of years, it was effectively the only game in town. That probably got people over a lot of friction

Obj-C was niche yes, but Obj-C worked really well with C/C++.

Yeah, and with OpenGL ES/OpenAL support it was pretty easy to port C++ games to the iPhone, with just a thin Obj-C wrapper.

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