Palm was making touchscreen smartphones for years before iOS came on the scene. My Windows Mobile smartphone in 2006 had the same resolution as the iPhone. Wind

Palm was making touchscreen smartphones for years before iOS came on the scene. My Windows Mobile smartphone in 2006 had the same resolution as the iPhone. Windows Mobile 6 was released before the first iPhone and had a very similar look and feel. Devices running it had a big, bright display that covered nearly the entire front of the phone, with large icons that launched apps. Microsoft was showing off their Surface product (with 1:1 user interactions, pinch to zoom, and swiping around) before iPhone's release. The concept behind it was pretty prevalent in science fiction, most prominently the movie Minority Report. Laying out apps in rows of icons has existed since some of the first UIs have been created. You don't have to look further than any Blackberry to see exactly where Apple got the idea from for doing it on a mobile device. The Danger Hiptop (commonly known as the T-Mobile Sidekick) had a complete app store that they called the Download Catalog. You wrote apps using their Java ME SDK, and the only way to get them onto the device was by distributing through this central repository. Apps would have to be curated and tested. Sound familiar? And this was back as early as 2002. Not to mention the plethora of Linux package repos. The concept of a centralized distribution store existed long before iOS. iOS was completely built on the work and ideas that already existed in the industry. Android was no different, only it happened to come out after iOS. So it incorporated those ideas as well. That's practically the definition of innovation. Trying to white-knight and make out Apple to be some saint of a company that didn't do the exact same (and completely justified) thing as Google is just naive. Google didn't "steal" from Apple any more than they did from Palm or HTC or Microsoft. Or any more than Apple "stole" from Palm or HTC or Microsoft.