In the early days Android had a very poor user experience, and Google didn't put much effort into changing that for the first few years. If you wanted a useable

In the early days Android had a very poor user experience, and Google didn't put much effort into changing that for the first few years. If you wanted a useable Android phone you'd buy from HTC or Sony who had a more user friendly UX, so in a way fragmentation helped there. Nowadays the experience is more mature, but even so a Samsung device has a very different feel from a Pixel or Xiaomi device, even though under the hood they can all be running Android Pie.