The Fairphone 6 is a pretty good phone.
Which probably explains the 35% market share if that's true.
But I get it, you wanted a cheap shot.
Also not everyone wants a shitty OS, that restricts even simple things like picture synchronization to promote their own shitty cloud service
The reason is how messaging works. In the US (and Canada?), SMS was affordable since before smartphones, and people kept using SMS once smartphones became common. Apple automatically integrated iMessage into that. Americans are used to texting using the default messaging app, and using an iPhone to text another iPhone provided a better experience than plain old SMS/MMS.
In Europe, SMS was extremely expensive in the late 2000s/early 2010s, so people never really used it, and instead started using cross-platform internet messengers. MSN, Skype, then WhatsApp. Android was/is seen as the same or better quality for a lower price, so why buy an iPhone?
https://github.com/sbaresearch/whatsapp-census/blob/main/cou...
As far as what people want... it depends... A lot of people have two phones anyway, since they don't want to pay the additional taxation for using a company phone privately. Also because it's easier to turn it off when you're not working. In education I would imagine a lot of teachers/professors would prefer to not give their private numbers to students.
The US hasn't turned out to be a reliable partner in the last few months.
I wonder what the take rate will be from people rejecting the Fairphone and requesting their own SIM instead. The inner IT purchasing cynic in me says this is just a simple way to cull out your purchasing costs by only issuing one quasi-unpopular* device.
* I used to issue out phones at a large hospital and we allowed device choice. We saw ~90% iPhones, 10% Android in our fleet.