But these phones aren't being released in America - they're being released in China. Why? Because the American carriers won't play ball (because the phones run stock Android), so they're forced to take their product overseas. In China, you can just buy a phone, put a SIM card in it, and you're off to the races.
Think about that for a second. A rare American hardware upstart success story is forced to sell its first phones in China because American carriers won't accept them.
Hopefully GSM will die soon and we can all use some kind of public, tor-rerouted, bandwidth-metered cryptophones over wifi. I'm sure the NSA will love that.
There's not much sense in fighting for something that is largely irrelevant to most people.
Next/somewhat in parallel, the EU forced national phone companies to be privatized and allow competition.
The net result is GSM, where companies share their networks, and subscriptions are tied to SIM cards.
For China, I guess they just made the right choice, looking at the USA and Europe as options.
1. Chinese carriers are all government-run, basically. There's basically two: China Unicom and China Mobile. Almost everyone used to use the latter, but Unicom is getting better recently (last few years). It takes a lot of effort to follow though, so I'm not 100% on all that (I'm back to China for Chinese new year in a couple of weeks, living in Thailand now!)
2. Nearly everyone uses prepay.
3. Most people aren't living in debt.
4. There is a massive market for cheap and/or stolen phones.
5. A not insignificant number of phones, particularly at the luxury end, are 're-routed' from the Hong Kong 'export' market back in to the mainland.
6. Chinese save a lot of money and don't tend to live beyond their means as much as Americans.
7. The entire mobile infrastructure is generally less than ten years old.
8. The Chinese produce their own infrastructure hardware (chiefly Huawei).
9. The Chinese government wisely sees infrastructure as a political and security tool, and so probably subsidises it in many ways. (This also goes for roads, electricity, etc.)
10. Coverage is far better than the US. You almost never have no coverage, even waaaay out in the hills. And in 10 or so years, I've never had a dropped call.
Similarly, I wonder how the the age or creator of the mobile infrastructure (7 & 8) figures into offering of mobile devices independent of network access by carriers - maybe in the homogeneity of the mobile network?