Because a smartphone is a conglomeration of billions of design decisions, and there's only a couple product choices today when it comes to smartphone ecosystems. If your answer is "market forces" for even 3 different attributes of the phone, then the market simply cannot support being able to control them.
The Invisible Hand worked great when you had 1000 people making hammers and sewing pants and harvesting wheat. It doesn't work so well when you've got 2 multi-national companies producing handheld supercomputers.
Writing a regulation or law is how the market (i.e., the people collectively) tell an industry that it needs to do something, always. The industry can't just hide behind "I'm going to do things A and B that you hate, because I'm also doing things C, D, and E that you can't live without".
Android has dozens of manufacturers, each making changes to the underlying os (which is why upgrading takes so long). There are small manufacturers like the essential phone and that 50000$ phone that is supposed to be secure.
While apple is definitely a monopoly in the ios market the phone market as a whole is definitely not an oligopoly
Why do you say that? It sure looks like it to me. Samsung and Apple are the giants, with a couple others like LG/Motorola/Huawei making up almost all of the rest. Googling for "smartphone oligopoly" turns up a bunch of economics and investing webpages that use smartphones as their prime example.
Is a $50,000 phone a realistic alternative to an iPhone?
The whole point of this exercise is to get a phone that is well-supported for longer. Should I really believe that an Android name from a no-name brand is going to have better long-term support? On what would I base that?
The "which is why upgrading takes so long" is a perfect example of an axis upon which consumers, via the market, have no control. If you want the latest version of Android, there's only 2 brands that offer it so far (Google and OnePlus), so you'd better agree with all of the other decisions that one of these two made.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_(cybernetics)#Law_of_R...
The Invisible Hand worked great when you had 1000 people making hammers and sewing pants and harvesting wheat. It doesn't work so well when you've got 2 multi-national companies producing handheld supercomputers.
Writing a regulation or law is how the market (i.e., the people collectively) tell an industry that it needs to do something, always. The industry can't just hide behind "I'm going to do things A and B that you hate, because I'm also doing things C, D, and E that you can't live without".