Spot on. There are substantial incentive of each company wanting to keep user on platform they have control over, if not massive for revenues from appstore tax, advertising, etc.
I think it suffices to say that it is becoming a primary goal selling you their phone (I don’t have data or evidence for this, just a feeling) – to get you to use their system and stuck with their advertisement slot or whatever every time you unlock your phone.
You pretty much had the answer in the query there is think. Just present it as toy to be handled.
To get more into detail, you probably would prefer those you can indeed pull apart and handle like toys than the “modern” slick ones. I see people mentioning raspberry pi. It’s hard to fear it looking at its guts with bare eyes. After they fried a few chips pressing soldering iron for too long they will have zero respect for electrical computers.