Samsung is the only rival in terms of hardware. Google lacks the attention span to execute. Everything else is even less baked.
I’d experiment with nerdy Android distros with a tablet. I used to have a Linux smartphone (whose name escapes me, which is driving me nuts) back in like 2006/7, it was fun but not a “daily driver”.
Why would I settle for an expensive device that makes browsing the internet painful? Why would I limit myself to only the software apple will approve?
It isn't even in the running and as long as their software policies remain as is, won't be in the running.
They also don’t work with non-Safari browsers (e.g. Firefox).
Please do source your claim that this has been possible for 7yrs, as that’s not my experience.
And the forced curation is dumb but if they're approving everything I'd want to use anyway, Android can eat it until they sort out their problems. What do I even need? Signal and Firefox with uBlock, that's really it.
On iOS, Signal can't do SMS and there's no uBlock. Of course.
That's up to Qualcomm, not Android. And Qualcomm needs to sell new chips every year, therefore planned obsolescence by tying the drivers to a version of Android works in their favor.
Samsung is also leaving a competitive advantage on the table by not doing this with Exynos.
And the planned obsolescence is pointless. Even if you could run the latest Linux kernel on a phone you bought ten years ago, a phone from that year might have a 3G radio and less than a GB of memory. Which can still make phone calls, or be used in place of a Raspberry Pi, but it's hardly competition for anything currently commanding significant margins.
How?
>Samsung is also leaving a competitive advantage on the table by not doing this with Exynos.
How is Samsung different than the rest? They also make their money from selling as much hardware as possible as often as possible. They don't have a way to monetize users post-sale through subscriptions, services and AppStore cuts. All that infrastructure is owned by Google and that's where the money goes to.
In general the same way they get ~every Android phone to ship with Google Play.
The most aggressive way would be to design their own chips like Apple does and put the drivers in the kernel tree, make the chips available to other phone makers and then require satisfactory open source drivers from everyone as a condition of using Google services. Qualcomm publishes the drivers or loses all their hardware customers to Google's chips.
> How is Samsung different than the rest?
Qualcomm has been a near monopoly. The next phone you buy will likely be one of theirs even if you're dissatisfied with the existing one, so they can screw you and still get your business.
Samsung is the underdog here, and hardware brand loyalty is weak. If they could sell more phones by giving the people what they want, their overall sales go up even if people keep them longer, because the latter is more at the expense of their competitors.