That is probably a US only viewpoint. Everywhere else in the world apart from Samsung, Xiaomi is super big as well as brands such as Oppo, Realme, Honor, Pocophone, TCL, Oneplus, Huawei, Motorola and many others I just can't remember from the top of my head.

i have the feeling that for anything in the US, everything has to end up in monopolies or bipartisan approach. People just seem to buy what their neighbors/coworkers/siblings buy without trying to do a bit of research. Some kind of deep vulnerability to virality. My mate has an iphone, I need an iphone, my neighbor beagged about their Thermomix, I need a Thermomix too immediately.

To be fair, in the US we can still walk into a Best Buy* and purchase a Motorola (my choice), Nokia, or OnePlus. In that environment, however, you will also notice that Samsung and Apple are the dominant device manufacturers, with consumers looking at Google phones as the stable alternative (for some reason).

There's also Amazon, which is often cheaper, but I am a bit old school in the regard that I like to physically use the device before I purchase it.

Either way, the perceived restrictions are more of a self-imposed thing rooted in our consumer conditioning here, which is this weird blend of "customer choice" and "all choices are basically the same" that gets muddy very, very quickly. Most people I talk to, especially the non-technical ones, do not realize that my $150US Moto is serving me just as well as an $600US Samsung would, with my needs being all the common types of communications, reliable 5G, a decent camera and run specific apps I use to control some cloud infrastructure while on the go. It's difficult to feel sympathy when I hear people complain about paying Apple $1000US just to look at TikTok or use Discord. We are guided on what to buy via the marketing machine instead of examining our use-cases and researching a suitable product before purchasing.

It's all silly bullshit, really.