As a longtime iPhone user, I'm very happy that the competitors copy shamelessly from each other. The more they take the good parts from competition and refine it, the quicker maturity can be improved the board.

We're in the era where basic phone capabilities have stabilized. Aspects of competing offerings converging, because it has become more well-defined what the basics of phone is, and the basics of how it's supposed to behave.

Less "innovation" (trial and error), more copying of basics, and marginal improvements is disappointing to techies, but it's good for almost everyone else.

Both iPhone X and Android P lifted their gesture navigation from webOS

Essential phone had a notch before the iPhone X :)

and iPhone X navigation is eerily similar to WebOS' cards paradigm. Everyone copies everyone.

That's not ironic, it's just something else that is true.

I don't know if notches are the best example. If Google has been keeping track of display technology, and I have no reason to doubt that they haven't, they had probably saw this coming miles away and had been preparing. Sure, it's not all open and public information, but Google has enough clout and HW ongoings to warrant meetings with display manufacturers regularly. Thus it's not a case of copying, but rather how product lifecycles and price points line up with the development cycle of the technology.