"There are literally hundreds of Android phones, yet people are willing to pay more for iPhones."
Because there are hundreds of manufacturers of Android ones, and only one for Apple. Microeconomics states that in a competitive market, price will tend to the marginal cost, and this is exactly what happened in Android. It is not "what people are willing to pay", it's that Android phones have competitive pressures that are downward on price. At the high end, people pay as much for Huawei Mate P30s as they do for iPhones, because there are few phones at that tier.
Your rebuttal actually proves my point exactly. If Apple licensed iOS, and let clone makers sell iPhone clones, the price would plummet, even if all of the features were the same -- same OS, same HW performance, etc.
Apple's creation of their own little walled garden, complete with path dependency, and slick marketing, has created a premium that would not exist if independent manufacturers could sell clones.
This is why PCs were cheaper than Macs, when clearly PCs had WAY WAY better HW than Macs, way better CPUs, GPUs, et al, for much lower price points, yet people paid more for Macs. Even back in the pre-OSX days, the PowerPC days, the Motorola days, people paid more for less, again, because of the way Apple locks in a chuck of their market with incompatible path-dependency.
I mean, I had an Amiga in the 80s, it had 4-channel stereo sound, 4096 colors, multitasking, awesome games, on a great C= monitor, and the comparable machine at the time was this tiny 128k 9" B&W display machine, which was hideously slow because it didn't even have enough RAM, and cost well over 200% more. Amiga had vertically integrated all-custom chips like Apple brags about today. It was the premium machine, so ask yourself why some people paid 200% more. It could do substantially less, graphically, and in terms of software available for it. And before you say "desktop publishing", in college I used TeX to do all of my work, and the output quality was superior with less effort. For the home PC user, it was way way overpriced for underpowered hardware and a paultry software selection. This is what Apple was competing against in the 80s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7rKj0DU8Xs
I'm an iPhone user, I've owned every iPhone since standing in line in 2007 to get one of the first. I use a Macbook as my primary laptop. So I'm not anti-Apple, but frankly all of the things I use iPhone or Macbooks for have NOTHING to do with their locked down App Store, refusal to allow me to install third party browser engines, or specify default apps, or side-load apps.
I want Apple to stop locking down freedom and when they sell me a computer or phone, let me OWN IT an do what I want with it. If Apple's ARM OSX Macs turn into a locked down system like their ARM iPad/iPhone, then this Macbook Pro and Mac Pro I own will be the last Apple devices I own, and it's hello Hackintosh or Linux desktop.