> ...it would basically hand the market over to Apple. They're the only company with the vertical integration to be capable of supporting all their hardware and software properly for this sort of time span.

Microsoft has no trouble supporting Windows and Windows Server for 10 years, and they're installed on innumerable number of different hardware configurations. The core issue is that Android's OS stack was built without a properly decoupled hardware abstraction layer (HAL), necessitating the phone's OEM, the SOC manufacturer and the carrier to all work together to prep an OS update. Google tried addressing this in Android 8 (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/05/google-hopes-to-fix-...), but even now, an OEM still needs a carrier's input when prepping a new Android OS update, and there's still simply no motivation from either.