As much as we're loathe to admit it, the USA represents the largest single market of wealthy (in global terms) customers. That means the USA is the place high-end consumer tech lives or dies. Other markets are more fragmented (so they're more expensive to sell in) or less affluent. There's lots of exciting things happening in Brazil and India, but those are lower-end spin-offs.
I'm a Canadian. Our entire consumer market is based on getting America's sloppy seconds. I have no illusions.
At least apparent discounts. You pay for them through your contract, and if the difference with a sim-only contract is small, that's because sim-only contracts are way too expensive.
Carriers are big, but it is possible to get around them. Most people get a phone with contract, but a lot of people really do go sim-only.
Fairphone is a nice example of a small Dutch organization that makes a revolutionary new phone (not available in the US). It's very successful so far, but also because they're not inventing their own platform; it's still Android. But the hardware is indie, so that at least can be done. (And a major carrier ordered a 1000 of them.)
You're completely disregarding the EEC and European Parliament. As an aside on language, while on the train to Brussels from Köln, I was chatting with some Young Greens who were en route to a pan-European Green conference. One was from Serbia, one from Germany and one from France, and we were all speaking in English, it tends to function as a lingua franca, so language has never been a barrier for me yet. The multilingual capacity of Europeans really puts me to shame, my German barely goes past "I would like a beer" and "I would like a coffee".
But yes, they have different languages, so i18n is a thing you have to pay attention to, and yes, they have different cultures and markets, so how you sell and engage people can differ. But you can recruit a small cadre of local sales experts to do your sales - a sister company of ours develops in the Czech Republic and sells in Poland, Romania and Turkey. The European market is hardly as balkanized as you make out.
If what you say was true, then iPhones would have presumably never impacted in Europe - after all, every european country has own laws, culture and language.
I agree that it's not impossible to sell in multiple countries at once, but it's just times bigger investment to get smaller combined market than US.
For Apple starting with US was a justification to spend probably billions on iPhone. Market was big enough for this gamble to make sense. You can't justify huge investments if your plan to start in Poland and then expand to Romania and Turkey. Or did that company go into all 3 countries simultaneously? And, btw, combined GDP of Czech Republic, Poland, Romania and Turkey is 1.65 trillion. GDP of USA is 16.86 trillion.
where i came from, you'd actually made fun of people that had the phone from the carrier billboard.
They control a section of the market that every smartphone mnnufacturer relied on. The Radio frequencies. This gives them power via their marketing subsidies, and it was this power they leveraged before they screwed up and ceded control to the platform. It used to be the case that the carriers controlled your wallet. Every single thing you did on the phone, the money went to the carrier, they held your credit details. AT&T screwed up and gave up consumer power.
Once AT&T ceded control and the popularity of iPhone as a carrier switcher came along the other carriers had to fall in line. This is not the case with Android, they don't control the updates. (Except in a stealthy way).