"the iPhone itself didn’t succeed until after Apple relinquished its total control over it"

NYT:

At launch, Jobs imagined the device as a phone that could go to websites. There were no third-party apps. Today, however, we associate our smartphones with the apps we use on them. They’re for Instagram or Facebook; they’re for WhatsApp, or for buying things on Amazon, or for checking your Gmail. They belong, in other words, to the internet giants, some of which are Apple’s competitors and together dominate the time we spend with Apple’s core product. In a bid to show people what they wanted, Jobs ended up creating perhaps history’s most efficient tool for simply asking them, and then letting others supply the answers.