S3 didn't launch until 2006, iPhone 2007, App Store 2008. In 2004 we had Palms and VPSs, but that doesn't quality as mobile and cloud in any modern sense of the word.

so I’ll hope you’ll forgive me 2 years then on my “decade” statement which was not meant as literally as you took it.

There were mobile phones before the iphone. Like a whole ecosystem even! They even had screens! and browsers! and internet!

the major innovation the iphone brought was a touch screen (and a decent camera), which sort of existed, but nothing as smooth and crisp as the iphone. please i really hope people out there dont think the iphone was the invention of the cell phone.

Parent didn't say "mobile was invented", said "the mobile boom" - which indeed didn't really happen until (a few years) after the iPhone arrived. The amount of money flowing into mobile software is now an order of magnitude (or more) higher than it was in 2007. I'm your average Apple hater, but without them forcibly removing carriers from the software landscape, today we'd have a much smaller mobile market.

It's like differentiating between "the Internet boom" and the invention of networking - nobody is saying the 14k modem was the invention of networking, but there was no "internet boom" before it.

What about the App Store? I never used a Symbian phone but I don’t remember a device that would have allowed as much as the iPhone in the way of custom apps.

I used the hell out of Symbian. There were stores and telcos would sell apps too. Games were far better on Symbian because it wasn't a touch screen, it was practically a joystick. We had chat apps and dating apps. I was a thirsty college guy who spent a lot of data on these apps but eventually settled for SMS because data was too expensive. Web experiences sucked; my first job was converting websites to jQuery mobile, which later became obselete thanks to responsive websites.

But you can't build a business like Uber on Symbian. The iPhone brought about all these marketplace apps. They stopped being toys, and became more like mini computers.

I graduated around 2012, Malaysia. A few things I distinctly remembered:

- some college girl doing CS was talking about how cloud is the future. I asked her what cloud was. She didn't know but mentioned the S3 stuff.

- my aunt, a clerk, was talking about how her job was training her to put documents in the cloud. She didn't know what a cloud was either.

- I got the worst career advice of my life. Someone said I should stop doing Android and learn to make BlackBerry apps instead, because that's what all the British people were using. On the other end, someone said I'd regret not making Windows Phone apps because they were superior in every way to Android.

- we were doing SVN to our own servers because this dude Joel put it as part of a checklist, and then we switched to Git because of the cloud thing.

- Uber (and similar) were just blasting off. In my country, it was MyTeksi (2011), later GrabTaxi (2013), then Grab (2016). They were the first "unicorn" in the region, where we hadn't experienced the dot com bubble, and regional VCs would pressure to raise and burn.

- Tech jobs were not really a thing here. Someone said that with my EE degree, I could get a real job as a KFC manager and keep all the IT stuff as a hobby. But in Malaysia, tech triggered hard around 2014. SMEs became startups. Malaysian entrepreneurs from the US were coming back here, becoming angels and VCs because it was easier to invest here than in the US. And GrabTaxi started pushed a wave of hype.

It's probably different in different places. 2014 was probably a later stage in Silicon Valley, but it was quite early here in SE Asia. There's delays.

It's also why I'm optimistic on things like crypto, web3, AI, because the tech is at a mature enough stage to build things on, but it'll be years before that tech is built and many more years before it's a household product. The story really starts when the tech is used by a billion people.