Basically, because Google gave him a taste of his own medicine. Ever heard this quote from Bill Gates, in an argument he was having with Jobs sometime around 1985:
“Well, Steve, .... I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."
The reference, of course, is that Apple stole the concepts of the graphical user interface and the mouse from the Xerox Alto, which they had. Microsoft then tricked Jobs into giving them a very broad cross-licensing agreement to develop software for the Mac. Just broad enough to allow Microsoft to implement pretty much the same concepts in Windows that Apple had originally stolen from Xerox and gotten away with it.
Well, history repeated itself more than two decades later.
Pay no attention to the mini-QWERTY keyboard, but do look at the screen of the Nokia E5–00, a phone introduced in the fall of 2010. Phones with this interface (called Symbian S60) had been coming out for nine years prior to this one; I just chose this model because I owned it, and used it until about 2013, and it still works in 2018. Anyway, you see it has the same type of app menu as current smartphones. It also had a primitive version of widgets for the home screen (as much as it could for having such a small screen), and did push notifications as well. It could access the Internet through a 3G connection, and did so very well as long as Symbian browsers were still supported. I remember doing quite a bit of my 2012 Christmas shopping from one of these while in a boring town board meeting.
Now, take a look at the original iPhone:
This came out in 2008, but like I said earlier, Symbian’s S60 platform came out in 2001! Apple lifted the basic design from it, put it on a bigger screen, and added a capacitive on-screen keyboard. Kudos to Apple for those ideas, but they basically ripped off Symbian’s UI and gave it a fresh coat of paint.
When the iPhone was a hit, Google redesigned Android, which it already owned, to have a similar interface. (Why Nokia didn’t go after them both is beyond me, but they made a lot of mistakes in those days…)
Apple broke in and stole the television again, and then Google broke into Apple and stole it from them:
(Android 2.3, one of the first usable “knockoff” versions, although in practice it made Windows 95 seem like a paragon of reliability.)
I’m sure the Apple fanbois have their own take on all of this, but Steve Jobs always had a problem with others playing by his rules.
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