Once native apps became important Microsoft didn't have a chance, the basis for Apple's success was in place back in 2003-2005. Apple had a big head start on what is now the standard phone template (always-on cell data, capacitive touch, etc), and based on the experience and success of the iTunes / iPod platform they found leverage to negotiate a unique deal where they controlled OS updates and the app store (instead of the carriers). They also had a lot of experience with OpenGL composited UI from OS X which translated to a (relatively) good GLES implementation on iPhone even though they didn't originally have any kind of public SDK. Very useful for games. Now I think there are some groups that are hoping LLM-based agents will upset the dominance of the app store model... I'm skeptical but we'll see.