> If the software it comes with is worse than stock Android then people should be replacing it with stock Android, or a community Android fork which is even better. Except that they're prevented from doing this by the OEM or Google, which is the anti-competitive thing that should be prohibited.

So it’s anticompetitive when one company controls the whole stack and it’s anticompetitive when dozens of companies get parts from different parts makers (just as you suggested) and compete by differentiating?

They still run Google Play Services (outside of China).

> An aggregator is doing something of value. It's doing something that a vertically-integrated monopoly would be doing internally, but doing it as a separate entity. If that thing is made reasonably easy to do then lots of competitors offer aggregation services which keeps their margins thin because the customer will choose the one offering a reasonable level of service at the most competitive price.

And is that aggregator going to pay to lay their own internet connection worldwide? Are they going to have multi AZ storage that is redundant across 3 available zones? Are they going to integrate thousands of POPs to create a CDN?

And tell me again how are any of the cloud providers monopolies when the CEO of AWS said that only 10% of all IT spend is spent on all three cloud providers combined?

> If Google Cloud has TPUs and Amazon S3 has cheaper object storage then the aggregator offers you both from a single source and prevents you from getting locked into a single cloud

You have no idea how much trouble multi cloud is at scale do you? (Hint: I use to work at AWS ProServe doing large implementation and now I do it at a third party company). Have you thought about that whole issue of having your data on one provider and your processing on another provider instead of having them both in the same data center? That whole network latency is going to kill you. Not to mention compliance, security, etc.

You’re always “locked into your infrastructure at scale. I’ve seen it take years to move a large implementation thst was nothing but a bunch of VMs.

> Apple is allowed to buy out all of TSMC's leading-edge fab capacity.

So that’s why Intel is so far behind because of Apple? That’s why AMD had to give up manufacturing their own hardware? Nvidia has been dual sourcing between Samsung and TSMC for years and Tesla just announced they are using Samsung for manufacturing chips in the US. Not to mention there is still Global Foundaries.

> Android isn't a real competitive market. It's captured by Google and has limited competition on the hardware side. In particular, the ability to run stock Android with a vanilla Linux kernel on a competitive phone is quite lacking.

Tell that to all of the manufactures in China. HN is full of people who run De-Google’s Android. There are hundreds of Android manufacturers and the Google Pixel doesn’t exactly have a high market share.

> What practical phone can I use that avoids both Google and Apple? Even less than that, show me even a mid-range Android phone that can run the vanilla Linux kernel with in-tree drivers.

Ask all of the people on HN that run alternate de-Googled Android phones and the billions of people in China.

You yourself can fly over to China and work with ODMs and do a run of phones that they will both your own AOSP customization. I mean you may not be able to but a decently capitalized investor can. This is what some of those point of sales customized tablets do.

I use to work in field services where large companies did this.

> Meanwhile Linux desktop market share is up to 5% this month, +40% YoY:

You sound like every startup founder: “we increased our market share by 100% over the past year from .01% of the market to .02% of the market.