Sun once tried to merge with Apple
That would have been nice.
That would have been nice.
It seems likely a Sun-Apple would have ended up with both companies destroyed, and Steve Jobs might have spent the early 2000s hawking enterprise web dev software like he was doing at NeXT in 1995.
Apple bet the farm on one phone, had the built-in fan base to leverage, and the resources to make it work well from day one.
Steve Jobs even said at its launch that the iPhone rans OS X and ran "desktop class applications". This with it's multi-touch full screen keyboard and GUI integration meant that people could interact with it much more naturally than any phone in the past. Even my mother could use it, which is remarkable, considering how many cell phones I gave her that she couldn't use.
I guarantee you that the most used features from day one of the iPhone launch were: Safari, Google Maps, and YouTube, with the Music app being simple a "nice to have".
https://corecursive.com/android-with-chet-haase/
So today Android might have a larger market share. Maybe the Windows Phone would still be a thing.