The GrapheneOS developers don't see it that way, and even think they have legal grounds to sue Google: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41119047

In a world where the iPhone exists and there's no effective regulations against their obvious anti-competive behavior (even the EU's DMA hardly did anything), I doubt any U.S. court will take them seriously, but I guess we'll see.

iPhone isn't a great comparable because their crime is one of bundling copyrighted property in a way we hate. And the law is extremely deferential to the interests of monied copyright owners. Android explicitly licensed their work as FOSS and invited others to build on their work, so bundling stuff this way is a lot more obvious an antitrust violation, and remedying the antitrust violation does not imperil any copyright.

To wit: the EU already got rid of the whole "Android phone vendors must not ship incompatible forks" rule. They did this so long ago that all the comments on the news articles about it have aged like milk. Most of us were still complaining that the EU was unfairly targeting US tech companies, rather than cheering on the EU for unfairly targeting US tech companies. And in the US, Google has already lost in court, against Epic, on a lot of antitrust issues. It would not be that far of a stretch to go to a court and say Google not whitelisting Graphene[0] is anticompetitive, and the main reason why that hasn't happened is primarily because Graphene is a small project run by a developer that harassed Louis Rossmann over something stupidly petty.

[0] assuming there's a CDD-compliant version floating around out there

GrapheneOS needs device made by Google. It's genial marketing.