I specified utility patents. The smartphone wars covered a huge gamut of different types of IP, including both utility and design patents. If something is purely ornamental in nature (and new), it can get a design patent. There’s quite a bit more nuance to it than that, tbf, but I’m on my mobile trying to gtfo bed in the morning so don’t really want to dive into a doctrinal lesson on patents.

Large corporations devote significant resources to developing patentable technologies strictly for IP creation rather than productization. Part of this is for aggressive licensing purposes, part is for participation in patent licensing pools with other major companies, and part is for defensive purposes wrt blowback analysis (i.e., someone considers enforcing their own IP, but the target has so much other IP that could be turned against them, the blowback risk outweighs the possible gain in a successful enforcement).

This is pretty different than a troll, which typically does not develop technology but rather goes out and snaps up assets on firesale from companies having solvency issues or pruning their portfolios. Moreover, trolls are not entering pools or worrying about blowback… they produce nothing so they cannot infringe a target’s IP.

Look and feel and basic architecture are respectively not eligible for utility patent or likely to be found obvious/directed to ineligible subject matter.