(The rest we are going to disagree on. I know the specifics of these agreements and advised on some of them, so i can't talk about them for rea)
"There's a very good chance that without it being open source it would have went precisely nowhere. "
Why?
You say a lot of things, but none seem to related to why this is true. As far as i can tell, it is definitively not true.
The app developers were happy to go where there was money, and the users certainly didn't care.
Again, i'm a huge supporter of open source projects, i donate to the FSF, etc. I would love for it to be the case to say that Android was a success/failure because of open source.
It's just i've seen exactly zero data that supports this notion, and a lot that doesn't.
The real history rewrite here is the rewrite that Android didn't enable choice or competition. Before Android all of the systems you're talking about had user interfaces that were tightly controlled by the carriers right down to the Verizon internet browser. Your best case scenario would be apple winning. Your worst case scenario is you still have Verizon deciding what your phone user interface should be like.
Developers and users generally won't care whether it's open source, I agree. Manufacturers like Samsung or Sony would though, especially after their experiences with Symbian. Not because they care about freedom, but because they want to have some form of control over their own destiny.
The US market was always an anomaly and under tight carrier control. There the iPhone and Android enabled choice.
This is however mostly irrelevant for the EU and especially for this verdict. It's undeniable that there are now fewer choices and competitors available, and that most of the ones that are gone have been killed by Android: Windows Phone, Blackberry, Symbian, Meego, FirefoxOS, etc.
I must say that the whole situation is very disappointing. While western companies have been folding, China has a very active smartphone ecosystem with multiple manufacturers of phones and many different providers of services, including app stores. Wasn't it supposed to be the other way around?
Android got market share because it was free, not because it was good. If Google didn't share ad revenue with carriers and OEMs or tried to extract a license fee ala Windows, Google would not be sitting on 80% global market share today.
> Android got market share because it was free, not because it was good.
If free was all that mattered then one of the other smattering of "free" open source mobile OSes would have taken off. You can perhaps say that free is a necessary condition but it clearly isn't sufficient. Something else matters and to a first approximation that can be thought of as "goodness".
The world has changed. Today what determines the success of a mobile platform is availability if applications. If Ubuntu's thing could run WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram apps (especially the first b/c it has to be an app), it would have a completely different fate. If I was Mark Shuttleworth, I'd go to Facebook and offer porting WhatsApp for free. IDK the US, but for most of the world, it's an essential means of communication.
Mozilla was so eager to get WhatsApp on Firefox OS that it wrote a proof of concept J2ME.js interrupter [1] (repurposing Shumway's Flash-to-JS JIT) to run WhatsApp's Java applet. But WhatsApp was not interested. This was a big blow because lack of WhatsApp support was one of the top complaints or deal breakers for Firefox OS users in its initial markets.
> If I was Mark Shuttleworth, I'd go to Facebook and offer porting WhatsApp for free
Microsoft tried buying app support and it didn't save their mobile platform. It generally resulted in crappy apps that were never an ongoing priority for their creators. If anything it cemented the status of the OS as a second class citizen.
You can try every way you like, but nothing completes the picture than to say that there were good things about Android that made it survive as the competition to iOS where everything else failed. The OS being "good" (on a relative scale, there were obviously some bad things about it) is, like everything else, necessary but not sufficient.
In my view, the real reason Android succeeded is because it was customisable by the OEMs. They were staring at a future where they were completely locked out of doing any customisation of operating system and totally at the mercy of Apple. They would do anything to prevent that future and Google gave them a lifeline to do so. That customisability was a byproduct of Android being open source, but obviously Google could have made it closed source to the public but licensed it to OEMs with a proprietary license allowing customisation too. I think the latter wasn't viable because it would have required too much trust in Google.
"There's a very good chance that without it being open source it would have went precisely nowhere. "
Why? You say a lot of things, but none seem to related to why this is true. As far as i can tell, it is definitively not true.
The app developers were happy to go where there was money, and the users certainly didn't care.
Again, i'm a huge supporter of open source projects, i donate to the FSF, etc. I would love for it to be the case to say that Android was a success/failure because of open source. It's just i've seen exactly zero data that supports this notion, and a lot that doesn't.
The real history rewrite here is the rewrite that Android didn't enable choice or competition. Before Android all of the systems you're talking about had user interfaces that were tightly controlled by the carriers right down to the Verizon internet browser. Your best case scenario would be apple winning. Your worst case scenario is you still have Verizon deciding what your phone user interface should be like.