Phones are very much unlike PCs in a lot of important ways. First, is that phone users value weight and size above all else. Regardless of what that means to e

Phones are very much unlike PCs in a lot of important ways. First, is that phone users value weight and size above all else. Regardless of what that means to each individual user, it does mean that any design compromises will need to come out favorably for weight/size considerations. Modular phones have been released, but they largely failed because they provided very little benefit for the added weight/size. Phones absolutely must be integrated devices as a result (i.e. no modular components, making them impossible to repair). Second is that because of the above, basically every chip in a phone is a custom SoC. So not only do you have to support many flavors of devices, you also have to support different flavors of SoCs, often used in different ways in different devices. This isn't insurmountable with the right driver repository structure, but good luck getting vendors to update those drivers. Third, I don't exactly know what benefits a less restrictive OS ecosystem would provide. Apple's App Store rules are not insane (there are so many bad actors out there, the curation is a huge benefit to users); and if you ever want to run programs that aren't "blessed" by Apple, you can buy a $99 developer license, sign the binaries yourself and sideload them through XCode. Could it be easier? Sure, it could. But it's realistically an edge case, and Apple is focused on the main use cases.