Not even in nearest terms, Android users mostly dont want to use iOS. Neither do most of the iOS users want to use Android. Like I said, they both are different kind of things of the same technology. Apple is no where near Android in world level in-terms of competition either. Like I said Kia is not a competitor to Rolls Royce.

Kia is not a competitor to RR because there are loads of luxury car brands that compete with RR and loads of general-to-expensive brands that compete with Kia.

In the smartphone OS market, it doesn't matter if apple is on the luxury spectrum and android is on the general spectrum, because they are the only relevant OSs around (excluding harmony because it doesn't have nearly as much market share as those two).

So yes, android and iOS are competitors, unless other luxury OS pops up to compete with iOS or OSs like harmony become more relevant to compete with android.

If Kia and RR were the only car brands, they'd be competitors of each other because there are "cheap" second hand cars by RR that compete with Kia (like second hand iPhones) and expensive Kia cars that compete with RR (expensive android phones that compete with apple ones).

I feel like you’re strictly comparing things in terms of price and OS. Im trying to say a Kia user wont want to buy RR or RR user wont want to buy a Kia. The comparison im trying to make is, Switch form iOS to Android and vice versa is very rare. You can’t really call two OSes a competitor if their users want two different things. The users of iOS and Android have different views on what their OS means. And People expect different things from an Apple vs Android. No one looks for Android ways in an Apple phone. And apple never even considers how Android ecosystem is before thinking yeah, we need to include it next release. You compete in same segments, not in different segments, or am I wrong about what I think competition is?

I see your point now. But either way, this was the original post:

> only real android competitor is manufactured by one company who doesn't allow even the end user to install apps not directly approved by Apple

Even if android and apple might be strongly separate segments of the smartphone market, since they are the only relevant ones at play (FirefoxOS is no more, harmony doesn't have significant market share and pure Linux is not a thing yet), they are the only competitiors of each other, because, even if not to frequently, we do observe people switching from apple to android and vice versa, people have no other alternative to get a mobile device to run their apps on.

Your point still stands, someone that's on android and want to leave android but doesn't like apple because they run the business in such a dramatic way, might feel like an OS monopoly, because Android and apple are so different from each other. Still, since both run out apps, both run browsers, both (usually) have cameras, etc etc, they are still competitiors, even if very weak ones (your car analogy doesn't apply here anymore, since smartphones and cars are very different, but it was a good analogy till now, but analogies only go so far).