This is a false assertion and a misconception.
Really?
Two "copying bad ideas" examples that spring to mind are the proprietary 30-pin connector (imagine an iPod 30-pin connector, paint it black, but don't make it compatible) that Samsung used on their early tablets (for no adequately explored reason) and Google dropping the headphone jack from this year's Pixel 2 - something that everybody knew was going to happen on the iPhone 7
long before it launched. Then there are disappearing features like SD card slots and non-replaceable batteries that were "courageous" features of the first iPhone.
It is also very well established that Apple's competitors copied the iPhone - e.g:
http://bgr.com/2012/08/08/apple-samsung-patent-lawsuit-internal-report-copy-iphone/
Companies look at their competitor's products all the time. Of course, it's one thing to copy an idea, it's quite another thing to provably violate a valid and enforceable copyright or patent (last I looked, the lawyers were still arguing and appealing) so don't mistake "copied" for "stolen and should be punished".
Not to mention, you have to factor research and development for a feature or capability for a smart phone that can take as long as the year before Its even ready to be implemented,
The timing actually works out perfectly. The biggest culprit for blatent-iPhone-look-alike,
the Samsung Galaxy S, didn't appear until Summer 2010 - 3-and-a-half years after the original iPhone demo. The pre-iPhone Android prototype was a
Blackberry-like device that looked nothing like the iPhone, and even 18 months after the iPhone launch the first available Android phone was
nobody's iPhone clone. It was only the
second generation of Androids - over 2 years after the first iPhone demo - that
started to get more iPhone-like (e.g. total reliance on the touch screen).
The Galaxy S really took the biscuit ...even going so far as to make the Android "back" and "menu" controls either side of the home button invisible until they lit up, so it looked like the phone just had a single home button... plus all those publicity photos showing the iPhone-like App Drawer instead of the actual Android home screen (despite the Android home screen being an improvement over iOS).