I am no iPhone/apple fan boy (in fact the opposite) but it is easy to forget that despite camera phones existing before the original iphone, the photos languish

I am no iPhone/apple fan boy (in fact the opposite) but it is easy to forget that despite camera phones existing before the original iphone, the photos languished on the vast majority of phones, never seen by others. To get them off you had to plug your phone into your pc, pull the media card, or pay through the nose to email them to yourself (unless you had WiFi at home which not everyone did at the time). MMS was the only common form of media sharing for loads of users and that really degraded the image quality - I forget the maximum MMS size but it was tiny. The iPhone and the apps actually encouraged people to share their images and explore others in the way that devices before didn't. And even if you didn't use the apps the ease of backup through iTunes was a massive boost to people accessing and using their images away from their phones. I had Dropbox on my android phones as soon as you could and would tell everyone to do the same, but for android it wasn't really until Google photos that photo backup and sharing got as simple and easy. And even recently it still wasn't installed on the majority of new phones, and manufacturers pushed their own backup/gallery apps that were rarely as good.