I don't think it's fair to characterise Jobs-era iPhones as buggy; they were significantly less buggy than Android, Meego and Symbian.

I think only BlackBerry OS was more polished, but it had significantly fewer things that people actually wanted.

There were bugs, sure, but I was working at Nokia at the time and what was cooking us was not "the luxury brand experience" (because, that comes later): it was that Apple had gotten the software of a mini-computer right, and they executed on it really well.

Android distributors tended to throw much more powerful hardware at the problem to achieve similar results to the consistency of experience.