Android was already a platform on life support. Google has wielded its authority to dictate how apps should behave such that even 3rd party stores do not stray far from Google's rules. Users of android phones have little hope to run a program from 5 years ago, or to roll back a bad update in an era full of bad updates.
Why don't you go back to 2006 and tell me which complete open source mobile OS you want to use.
An immense amount of time was spent beating up vendors and others to be able to release, as open source, an OS that you could actually build and put on a phone. These were the days that verizon and AT&T and other controlled exactly what OS's were allowed to run on phones.
Even being able to unlock a bootloader was not a thing.
The only thing that has happened for "as long as i can remember" is that different factions of open source folks have never been happy with the precise contours of AOSP vs what they want, and choose to shit on the immense hard work of lots of people as a result.
Yet i doubt any of them would be close to where they are, at all, had android not been released as open source.
Can we please stop rewriting history because we have some disagreement with the contours. It was an immense leap forward for open source OSes on phones.
Apple released the iPhone and basically told all of the carriers "tough crap, you can't put your bloatware on our phones. This started with AT&T (exclusive carrier for iPhone) and by the time that agreement ended, every carrier was clamoring for the iPhone on their network. It was the next big thing after all. If you don't want us on your network you can explain to your customers why they can get an iPhone on a competitor, but not on your network." Vendors had no choice.
I dunno, Early iphone did not have the market share to command this in the way it does now. Android did fairly quickly, knocking off Symbian and RIM much faster and getting to higher market share much faster than apple.
Honestly, I think it was both in combination - and more particularly, that none of the up and comers (apple or android) were willing to accept control on the part of the carriers.
Back then Google was even bidding on spectrum :)
I'm unsure what would have happened if only one of android/iphone had existed.
Apple did not go for market share, that’s what makes you misunderstand what happened. Android was nothing when the ball started rolling, which is when Apple used its leverage (and Cingular’s struggle at the time) to be as independent of the carrier as it could. The early success of the iPhone spooked Verizon, which put a huge amount of resources behind the Droid campaign, which is when Android really took off. This is fairly well documented. RIM obsoleted itself by not taking it seriously, and then seriously fucking up the Torch.
Android ended up getting the largest market share because it was in the right place at the right time. Google had the technical abilities and humongous resources to develop it, so the OS was good enough. And the OEMs rushed to provide modern hardware cheaper than iPhones. Google itself did not need to get money from phone sales and was happy to let OEMs die if they failed to race to the bottom.
I disagree pretty strongly with this - I was around at the time, involved in the contracts and very close with the business folks.
This is definitely not the version of history i lived or remember :)
But honestly, it was also 2 decades ago so i don't care enough to go dig up data to refute it, so i'll drop it.