I realize people are downvoting you, likely due to a lot of the shady crap apple is doing-

But, your comment is actually correct.

Perhaps, many people were younger and don’t remember that time too well.

At that time, every vendor had its own proprietary OS. There were no generally accessible app stores on phones. Hell, half of the phones didn’t really have true internet either. There used WAP

Around the time of the iPhone, I remember having these various phones-

• Blackberry. was fantastic until the trackball fell out. :-/
• motorola razor
• Samsung SCH-i760 (This phone was amazing for its time. A slide-out phone, running windows. Even had age of empires on it! User interface was extremely clunky though. Really neat concept)

Then- we got the iPhone. These, actually had a interface which didn’t suck.

It had an app store. You could download thousands of games, and apps. For its time, this was actually quite revolutionary.

And- we also quickly found out about rooting the iPhones, to add features such as… being able to organize icons into folders. etc. Good old cyndia.