The app store was present in Sidekick. Sidekick was made by Danger Inc. Danger Inc. was a company founded by Andy Rubin who then went on to found Android Inc. w

The app store was present in Sidekick. Sidekick was made by Danger Inc. Danger Inc. was a company founded by Andy Rubin who then went on to found Android Inc. which was bought by Google and Andy Rubin now runs the Android show. So one of the features that, according to your misinformed opinion, originated in iPhone, was actually done before by a company started by a guy who runs Android. Then again, I doubt Danger Inc. was the first to come up with the idea of integrated application store. It's really a logical evolution of PalmGear, which operated since 1997 and was the biggest application store for Palm OS devices. It was a website but it's not such a great leap to integrate that directly into OS. It couldn't be done in 1997 because PDAs didn't have internet connection but finally the wireless technology caught up and Apple was the second company to do the obvious. The same goes for multi touch. It has been done in other contexts before - Apple didn't invent the idea. The single touch UI was done years before on Palm devices. I'm not sure if Apple was the first to do multi-touch specifically on a phone but it was, again, an inevitable evolution of existing ideas. It just happened that Apple was designing the first gen of their product from scratch at the time when multi-touch screen technology was mature enough for mass market so they could bake it really well. Mobile Safari? How is a web browser on a phone Apple's invention? Palm OS had decent browser a decade earlier. Safari is better but only because the hardware available to iPhones is orders of magnitude better than the hardware on those Palm devices. But the real problem with such arguments is that you completely discount the tens of thousands of ideas that Apple had to "copy" (using your terminology) from earlier phones. Sure, they've added a few things of their own, but so did everyone else. The nature of technology business is that you take the best of what exists today, you add a few unique pieces and release an improvement version. It's myopic to complain that Google copied some ideas but completely ignore the Apple's massive copying of ideas that is iCloud (just to give one example).