Sam Byford, The Verge:

Often, using an iPhone in a Japan just straight-up sucked. The missing features hurt, of course, but the bigger problem was that having experienced what life was like in the tightly integrated Japanese mobile ecosystem, moving to the iPhone felt like using a product that simply wasn’t designed for the world I lived in. Because, well, it wasn’t.

How, then, did Apple get to its current position where Japan is one of its strongest and most lucrative markets?

Fascinating inside view of the iPhone’s early days in Japan.