There is nothing in principle requiring Android phones be locked down, but its a de facto reality that manufacturers of almost all phones have made them locked down and you have to research to even know beforehand if you can even do something as little as a bootloader unlock or a rooting. Why is os and phone model so tightly integrated and locked together, when in the pc world you can generally install any os on any computer? That's what I was saying.

Which is to say I think you are speaking in terms of what you can do within the android's playground itself, its certainly much more open than ios in that regard. But when it comes to the fact of being able to change the playground itself ie install whatever os you want on the hardware or upgrade the os on the phone then suddenly most phones aren't any better than iphones either. Some are slightly better in that you can at least unlock the bootloader or root it, but I don't know if much progress has been made beyond that in being able to reverse engineer or otherwise them to able to install anything you want on them. That was the point with respect to I was speaking.