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The tech “big four” of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google rule our online lives, determining what and who we see, what opinions come our way and what products we buy. Their dominance is down to strategy, ambition and luck – but above all products that keep us coming back for more. Here’s how they did it.

2007: Smartphones

We’d had mobile internet and feature phones before, but Apple’s iPhone was the first true smartphone. Its combination of design and functionality – combining voice calls, messaging, internet access plus a camera to record the world around us – put Big Tech into our pockets as a constant, must-have companion. The first smartphone running Android, the Google-developed operating system, came out a year later.

The price we paid was not just a monthly contract bill, but our data. Through their phones and an ecosystem of apps that work on them, Apple and Google gained access to a wealth of information about our movements and other habits. They use this to improve their services and make them seem even more indispensable – and, in Google’s case, sell advertising to third parties. The cameras proved a source of even more data used to develop more tools such as face recognition, which would in turn keep us buying Big Tech’s products.

2009: The “Like” button

Facebook developer Justin Rosenstein developed the “Like” button with the stated aim of making interactions on the social network more positive. But a-not-entirely-unintentional side effect was to…