> This was not a factor. Windows phone lost because they didn't have apps.

They didn't have apps because nobody likes them. If you're a user and you expect them to be well-liked then you buy the phone expecting others to buy the phone and developers to target it. If you're a developer then you make apps expecting enough users to buy the phone.

But if you don't like them and you're not sure anybody else is going to like them then you play wait and see instead, and so does everybody else, and so they have no apps and no users and people start to see that they have no apps and no users.

Which is why they kept changing things trying to force people to do it, giving Windows 8 that widely-disliked tablet interface on desktops etc.

> YouTube refused to write an app and sued to block Microsoft from writing their own YouTube client

Oh no, did someone with a dominant OS market share do an anti-competitive thing to Microsoft?

You're asking why people don't pick up Linux faster but you can see the symmetry when it's going the other way. It's not that they don't want to, it's that 80% of enshitification is lock-in.