And yet it wont work, because nobody is going to ditch their Apple phones, and the Apple ecosystem for a knock off version full of bugs, unfinished software, and very poor ecosystem in comparison... not to mention getting about 20% of the value of the phone back after 2 years. Apple can get away with having relatively underwhelming specs because the software is beautifully optimised, the same sadly cannot be said for Android.
Basically because Google tax; they are trading on the reputation of vanilla Android, but unfortunately for Google, that is not the draw it used to be for consumers. Other Android manufacturers are actually making a better fist of it now IMO, with more features and more reliability, people don’t really generally care about feature updates anymore. Vanilla Android alone is not worth paying the premium for, not when you can get £200 phones with that so called selling point!
As for the lack of wide angle, basically they expect people to use the photosphere function instead. It works fairly well, but it’s a lot of effort compared to a proper UW lens and can result in artefacts unless you’re looking at a completely static image with no moving objects.
Google seem incapable of learning from their mistakes at this point. The amount of people I’ve seen on forums and reddit suggesting they are going to move to Apple now makes me think that Google are facing an uphill battle from here. Given their propensity for abandoning products, I honestly wouldn’t be completely surprised to see them give up with phones within the next five years - not the OS, but the actual hardware. They just don’t seem to be able to compete, which is mind boggling for a company of their resources.