Comment by tpmoney

Samsung, Sony, Google, LG, Xiaomi, Motorola, Nokia, TCL, Kyocera, Fairphone, Pine64, Purism, and many others are more than "literally only one other competitor". And even if your complaint is that the only other option is "Android", there's no reason why those manufacturers couldn't make their own OS if they wanted to. There's no reason why even if they didn't want to, they couldn't make their own custom Android distribution.

If the linux community as small as it is can produce multiple varied and unique linux distributions largely on the backs of volunteers, there's no reason why these manufacturers (especially some of the bigger names) couldn't do the same with Android / Linux and their own hardware. And whatever reason is behind the failure of literally the entire cellphone industry to do what they were doing before the advent of iOS and Android, it isn't because Apple is somehow stopping them from making their own OS, and SDKs and app stores.