An an original iPhone user (before the App Store launched), I strongly disagree. The original iPhone was awesome on its own and changed my life more than having additional apps have. Having a large high quality responsive touch screen interface with excellent UI/UX of a real web browser, email, calendar, maps, etc. was a huge thing.

I also strongly suspect that many app store apps could be replicated as web apps given no alternative, and that mobile web progress (both browsers and frameworks) would have also moved much faster and be in a significantly more mature state had not most of the focus shifted toward native apps.

Indeed, the iPhone damn impressive & shiny but a bit rough to justify. I remember thinking "If they'd just let people write apps for it, this thing could be absolutely amazing..." but even then, it it was apparent iPhone wasn't just a phone. When Apple announced the App Store, I dumped my Verizon contract shortly after and picked up an iPhone 3G.

Often, I'd be willing to bet that the naysayers never used first hand an iPhone. I don't think I've ever been more awed by a single piece of technology. Not even my first laptop, a G3 500 MHz PowerBook in 1999 that had an AGP ATI Rage 128 Mobility, Firewire and a DVD Drive left me that blown away. Everything about the iPhone 3G was amazing, with most intuitive user interface for something so foreign. It immediately changed the way viewed information, my friends would joke "Ask the godpod!"

It was one of those things that despite the absolutely absurd amount of press coverage and hype, was justified and even then it might have been short.

Well, the iTunes store came online in 2003. Not much of a stretch to foresee a marketplace for apps much like the marketplace for music. Whether it would be successful or not is another thing.

There were already app stores for Symbian, J2ME, PocketPC and Psion devices.

They just weren't as integrated as iTunes.

Linux had centralized package management for like a decade before the iPhone. The App Store was hardly novel, just gorgeous and very successful. But I still use apt-get daily…