There were mobile devices with large screens and web browsers doing "web apps" years before iPhone. I know because I worked on Gecko browsers for two different

There were mobile devices with large screens and web browsers doing "web apps" years before iPhone. I know because I worked on Gecko browsers for two different OSes on those form factors starting with Pocket PC in 2003-ish all the way through Windows Mobile 5 in 2007ish. We also got running on Maemo with big screen handheld devices in early 2004, collaborating directly with Nokia and that Linux-based OS team. A full Gecko browser worked on multiple big screen 3G mobile communicators doing ajax apps before Gmail invites were a thing, years before iPhone. Apple didn't pioneer here; they fast followed us and others. Heck, we were running Gecko on the iPaq 64MB devices in 2001 and third parties were distributing that in 2002. Not some WAP browser, not some brew joke, but Gecko, the same Gecko that was taking the web by storm with Firefox pre-release versions (and of course Mozilla 1.0 and Netscape 6-7) the same Gecko plus DomI that inspired web apps and ajax to take off in the mid-2000s.Web apps were a thing in 2005 and so were mobile web apps. Joe Hewitt, a co-conspirator of mine on Firefox, who gave us both DOM Inspector and Firebug, was a web app master having built the entire Firefox UI out of XUL, CSS and JavaScript and Mozilla's and Netsape's UIs and themes before that. He wrote iUI, the first ajax framework explicitly for iPhones in the period before Jobs suckered everyone into the App Store and sunk those who'd invested substantially in the promise of web apps that Apple fully abandoned. iPhone was no surprise to us, nor Apple running a powerful browser as an app framework, as we and others had done the same thing with Gecko (Ever see the Mozilla Amazon Browser, an entire Amazon client written on top of Gecko back in 2002-2003 not much different than what we see so many Electron apps today. Multiple books were written on all of this. It's not a secret and yet everyone seems to insist that Apple was the first smartphone with a capable web browser and browser-based apps. They got it right where everyone before had failed in some way, but they were not the pioneers, they were the swift following colonizers that came to pave the cow paths that we and others laid down, only to abandon the suckers who believed they'd keep investing in the web on iOS, something that has only just started to happen in the last couple of years.