It's really nothing like your terrible analogy. Bad analogies are bad.
Ownership of software is clear-cut under the law: unless you hold the copyright, it's not yours. You have been granted permission to use the software under the restricted terms of a license. In practice though, the legal perspective isn't a useful one. It's another bad analogy, useful only because it's the one backed by law. What actually matters is what you can do.
It doesn't matter who "owns" it, you don't have the code needed to recompile the OS from source. Much less than sideloading apps, there are thousands of nominally trivial aspects of the OS which you cannot change without source code and a working build environment. Without this you don't have any ownership over the software in any useful sense.
You do own your piece of physical iPhone hardware, and it's yours to muck about with as much as you wish. But don't expect schematics or the ability to manufacture your own parts, or the ability to sideload more processing cores into the A14 chip, or replace the camera with a different module.
Ownership of software is clear-cut under the law: unless you hold the copyright, it's not yours. You have been granted permission to use the software under the restricted terms of a license. In practice though, the legal perspective isn't a useful one. It's another bad analogy, useful only because it's the one backed by law. What actually matters is what you can do.
It doesn't matter who "owns" it, you don't have the code needed to recompile the OS from source. Much less than sideloading apps, there are thousands of nominally trivial aspects of the OS which you cannot change without source code and a working build environment. Without this you don't have any ownership over the software in any useful sense.
You do own your piece of physical iPhone hardware, and it's yours to muck about with as much as you wish. But don't expect schematics or the ability to manufacture your own parts, or the ability to sideload more processing cores into the A14 chip, or replace the camera with a different module.