I got rid of my phone for 3 years and my employer (between failed attempts at startups) was appalled that I would even consider this. They became irate but eventually acquiesced. It's weird how much people can't understand how others don't want their addiction. This doesn't happen with heroin, or other drugs, just technology.
It comes down to innovation. I bought iPhones because they were innovative. People aren't buying new phones because there is little marginal utility in upgrading anymore.
We can break the innovation opportunities down into several areas:
1. Hardware
2. Operating System
3. Software/Apps
Hardware hasn't been innovated. The closest thing we got was the hope of a modular phone that was bought for the patents (?) and killed inside of google. The best thing we get is better cameras, biometrics, and screen resolution. Not many people care about cameras (not including selfies), biometrics is sort of a lame duck (who needs their face constantly scanned? or fingerprints as passwords for everything), screen resolution doesn't anymore because the screen size is so small -- majority of people play easy games, like LoL, PUBG, and Candy Crush clones.
Operating system experience is converging on features between iOS/Android to the point they are really indistinguishable.
Software is limited because of hardware specs, walled gardens, and the learning curve -- but much more nefariously I software devs might just be afraid if they build something cool these companies would just turn around and steal it/bake it into the OS.
Alternatively we could see adoption start moving horizontal into other peripherals like VR/AR/IoT devices (watches) -- but I'm not holding my breath on that until I see a company come out with something amazing. For instance the precursor to the iPhone was the Samsung i300, the leap from the i300 to the iPhone wasn't that big for me, but it changed a lot of things that just made sense.
The leap for peripherals right now would be too great to expect a magical turnaround in adoption -- but I would love to be first in line to be proven wrong.
So where does that leave us? Well we need to rethink things from the ground up again. We've hit local maxima with experience.
This is why consolidation of power is bad. You can't out run their influence and consideration. Competition is great in both tech and state because you have options (barring collusion).
Spoken like someone who hasn't built an entire company from scratch multiple times. It takes a lot to build and share the vision, get buy-in from believers, build up an audience, distribution, marketing channels, the "right" team, right product, the list goes on -- and all of this is both physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausting.
It's REALLY hard to just reboot into something else you pour yourself into.