The reason it's like that is that 1990s Microsoft used carrot and stick to make the hardware vendors do the right thing and present day Google isn't doing that when they're the ones who would need to.

The alternative would be for the hardware market to be less consolidated (the government keeps allowing Qualcomm to buy up competitors) so that the chip companies would have to compete on things like this. But that's no excuse for Google to be sitting on their hands when they could fix it too.