You could argue Apple just followed the "canned phone" approach but, later, decided to allow 3rd parties in as a marketing way to grow/differentiate the iPhone ecosystem.
I don't fault early-Apple in this regard.
Apple, and later Google when Android got better (who remembers the pre 1.0 releases? They weren't great) changed the face of mobile, but they didn't invent smartphones, or the idea of a third party app ecosystem. They made it much better, but Apple didn't even originally support third party apps. Steve Jobs thought that everyone who wanted other types of apps would just use web apps, but that hasn't really happened due to a number of factors (partly OS manufacturers locking down which APIs are available, although I haven't worked on that side of development for a few years so it might have changed).
edit: I forgot about Symbian. I worked in the US and it wasn't really that common, at least I never talked with a customer that used it.
There were lots on nokia, in part by necessity given how dreary S60 was (I remember having to install third party software in order to have an alarm, as well as opera mini because the built-in browser was unusable on edge).
But even “legit sites” looked like warez, not just because it was 2005 but also because there was basically no ecosystem so this was mostly lone devs doing their thing on the sly, and of course we had little graphical taste (as demonstrated by wielding nokias). And the install / update experience as I noted above was quite awful.