Because you're buying a plane and the phone is an analogy. Separately, both iPhone and Android have essentially their full functionality available without *paying* for a subscription.

> both iPhone and Android have essentially their full functionality available without paying for a subscription.

This is untrue. iOS ships with several features that you cannot enable without government regulation or an annual developer fee.

Android is Open Source and therefore does have a full feature-set available free of charge. iOS undeniably ships with disabled entitlements that only paying users can access. Whether or not you consider these software limitations salient is debatable, but the fact they exist is concrete.

The F-35 is "essentially" full featured without American support, as long as the functionality you're referring to is the airfoil. We can make all sorts of silly definitions that confer innocence to OEMs, and many of them are both factually and practically wrong.

> Android is Open Source and therefore does have a full feature-set available free of charge.

This is assuming a pretty narrow definition of "full feature-set". It is a inacurrate to say there is feature parity between an Android phone running Google Play Services vs one that is not.

It's more like a Tesla car

"Separately, both iPhone and Android have essentially their full functionality available without paying for a subscription."

Really? Everyone I know has a subscription to make a phone call on one of those devices.

Everyone I know has a subscription to an internet provider for the Wi-Fi.

I suppose you could take your phone to a cafe to do all your software stuff