Whether Apple was truly serving its users and business model and only incidentally exploiting Google's Achilles' heel is a matter of debate. But there is no doubt that the sentiment of revolt against the shabbiness of the mobile web was coming from an even deeper and broader place. Writing in the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan described the media as “technological extensions of man”; in the 2010s it had become more obvious than ever that technologies like the smartphone are not merely extensions but technological prosthetics, enhancements of our own capacities, which, by virtue of being constantly attached to us or present on our bodies, become a part of us.

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 1131