> Addition: And I think one thing that really hurt the Android ecosystem is when Android phones went through that phase of every phone flagship phone had some sort of gimmick. Where as Apple really just buttoned down and developed a really solid phone. A lot of android phone makers were just focusing on gimmicks like styluses or niche features to set them apart from other Android instead of just really developing a good solid smart phone.

This is how I look at it as well. Because anyone can make an Android phone, Android phone makers had to either race to the bottom or come up with their special gimmick. Those that came up with a gimmick became the phone for people who care about that gimmick. But this ceded the domain of "people who don't particularly care about which phones have which gimmicks," aka most people, to Apple.

Pixel managed to break out of this by having their gimmick be "flagship by the people who wrote most of the OS, so, just generally well-implemented," but it took a while to get there.