All I'm saying is that Apple blinked. By offering Airplay on smartTVs as a service, they have uncovered a crack in the garden wall that has kept other hardware from using the services from inside the garden. Now, will they widen that crack, or close it up? Nobody knows, but by opening this crack they have opened up a potential to have all of AppleTV as a service, competing with Roku and Amazon, but with zero hardware required. Just sign up, pay a monthly fee and you have everything you could if you owned an AppleTV box. If they are willing to give up making that hardware, then maybe other hardware could also be phased out and services replacing it. Time to stop thinking in terms of "android" and "iOS" phones and think of picking an environment as a service. Want FaceTime, Messages, access to the iTunes store? Select iOS as a service. Want the android environment, store, etc? Pick Android, or Windows, or whatever is offered. Apple can sell hardware designed to make maximum use of the ecosystem while at the same time opening that ecosystem to other hardware, with the limitations that the "alien" hardware may or may not be able to fully participate in the ecosystem depending on how close to an iPhone it is.
Another paradigm breaker is going to be 5G cell service. At those speeds, the "phone" can be almost a dumb terminal, with the entire ecosystem in the cloud. So you get a "dumb" smartphone (champion oxymoron!) and connect to the cloud through that 5G service to gain access to the "smart" part of the phone. No 5G WiFi? No smarts, just a phone with maybe a camera and enough memory to hold a few pictures you take, or an app with a little bit of data. 5G available? Smartphone! Pick your environment--Android, iOS, Windows, whatever, and go. Once 5G is widespread enough to support that conveniently, the first company to go to dumb smartphones will capture a huge portion of the market. At those speeds, maybe all you need will be a wearable (watch? clothing?) that connects. Again, IAAS.
The biggest challenge is going to be where 5G is not available. I currently make a two hour drive to visit my brother in hospital in Charlottesville, VA. On the way, I get into a thirty-minute long black hole with zero cell coverage. Normally I stream music as I go, but when I hit the hole, I shift to music stored on the phone, or a podcast I listen to that is downloaded to the device. When I get to where I know the service is good again, I go back to streaming. With a "dumb" smartphone it will be a challenge to allow me to cover that 30 minutes. Maybe keep all the apps in the cloud, then when I get close to my dead zone, I download from the cloud a music player and music I like. That could even be automated into a "favorite" button, or even an automatic function whenever the signal drops below a certain level. Lots of ways to make it work reasonably well.
And for those who say "never," let me remind you that in the early days of cell phones you had to select between CDMA and GSM in the hardware. Now you just get the phone and let the sim card drive it. And with esim, it's getting even easier to change the personality of the phone. So why not with the OS?