The thing is nobody was even trying to create a smartphone platform remotely like the iPhone. The standard approach was crippled cut-down mobile OSes with share

The thing is nobody was even trying to create a smartphone platform remotely like the iPhone. The standard approach was crippled cut-down mobile OSes with shared memory architectures and proprietary tooling stacks. There's no way to get from Symbian, Windows CE or the Blackberry stack to a workstation class, pre-emptive multi tasking, multi-threaded full stack OS. Even with the iPhone right in front of their eyes it took Microsoft 2 years to even correctly identify the problem. The only reason Android managed to catch up was they happened to have started from a Linux kernel base. The thing is they'd done that for the developer tooling, not because of the platforms capabilities. What they were aiming for was an open source Blackberry clone because that was the dominant platform in market and mind share. Given that it took Microsoft until 2012, 4 years after the launch of the iPhone that's a reasonable absolute minimum lower bound for how long it would have taken. I think it's quite plausible the modern smartphone might not have existed until 2015 without Apple, possibly more. Bear in mind the only reason such powerful ARM cores were developed since 2008 was due to the smartphone arms race.