If that's how "we lost this war", then it was lost before it even started. Even before Apple released their phones, it was already the case that phone firmware came only from the phone manufacturer. That is: phones come from a different lineage than PCs, and were never as open as general purpose computers ended up being.
There were only a scant handful of years where there even existed phones where this could matter... but now this same mentality is being applied to every new category of device--all of which acting as general computing devices--based on these precedents.