There's really no need to bet. It was a blackberry clone and then pivoted the moment the iPhone was announced. The early Android SDK still had affordances for navigating around the UI using joystick style buttons to select UI elements and physical keyboard use. Apple moved the state of the art to touchscreens with little to no physical controls and Google followed.

A bunch of android still works like that for navagating around the UI. (from my limited experience dealing with cheap android devices via keyboard/remote control) Probably not as well supported in third party apps using non-native UI bits.

are you trying to defend apple, or are you trying to shame google? just curious because I understand the latter, but the former wouldn't make sense since apple is not any better in their behaviour