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Reception and legacy

The original iPhone has been described as "revolutionary" a "breakthrough handheld computer", and "the best phone that anybody has ever made". It is now Apple's bestselling product, has been credited with helping to make Apple one of the world's most valuable publicly traded companies by 2011. Newer iterations have also received praise and awards.

Before the iPhone, smartphones were mostly used for texting, calls, and email; more advanced functions were harder to use and inconvenient on a small screen. They were also hard to develop for, and lacked a thriving app ecosystem like the App Store (released in 2008). Many phones were heavily customized by mobile carriers, which led to feature fragmentation and prevented these phones from turning into thriving software platforms. In contrast, Apple's iPhone SDK provided a wide range of APIs, made mobile development far more accessible, and was instrumental in turning the iPhone into a "Swiss army knife" with a wide range of features and apps.

Successive iPhone models have generated significant fan enthusiasm, with many customers queuing up in front of Apple Stores on launch day. As of 2021, the iPhone has higher brand loyalty than any other smartphone.

The iPhone's success has led to the decline of incumbents Nokia, BlackBerry, and Motorola. RIM, Symbian and Microsoft all attempted to develop more modern operating systems to compete with the iPhone, like Maemo, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry 10; all were unsuccessful. Google successfully started over on their Android project, and designed it for mass adoption by carriers and phone hardware manufacturers. Today, iOS and Android account for 99% of smartphones used worldwide.