Apple is different because it has scale and margin.

Apple releases very few models and sells a lot of them. That means that they have buying power that component sellers can't ignore. They aren't ordering 100k or 500k of a display size. Apple also has the cash to pre-pay for components. Most companies don't have those advantages. Nokia likely wouldn't have been sure enough of a new product to put in a large enough order to be a price-setter. It's also important to note that a lot of Nokia's market-share was on the low-end in the world (emerging markets that don't command premium prices).

Nokia certainly had some great people and great products. I liked them a lot. But I think Nokia would have needed a lot more variation in models like Samsung has, but without its own chip foundry or display-making capabilities.

Motorola also had a strong pre-smartphone brand (commanding 22% of the market compared to Nokia's 36%). Motorola also got involved with Android way before November 2011. It didn't save them.

One of the things to realize is that the market was stacked against ALL of the former mobile makers (regardless of brand, designers, or supply chains). The Motorola Droid came out in October 2009 - more than two years before the Lumias. The Motorola Droid was a good phone with a higher resolution display and camera than the iPhone at the time. It was really nice. It didn't save Motorola.

I'm not saying that Nokia is bad or anything like that. I'm saying that companies that had great brands like Motorola or SonyEricsson jumped on the smartphone bandwagon before Nokia and failed. And I think Nokia's products were historically better than Motorola or SonyEricsson, but by the time Nokia joined the smartphone fray, Samsung was firing on all cylinders. Even companies that joined early like Motorola got swept aside by Samsung.

Why would an Android Nokia have done better? The Lumia phones were fine, but they weren't something that made a Samsung look bad. If anything, phones from Android manufacturers seemed better.

There was certainly mismanagement. However, that's not saying it's just the Android decision. Motorola went to Android very early and put out some great phones, but it didn't leave them in a strong position in the smartphone era. Nokia releasing a below-average-spec'd Android phone in November 2011 just doesn't seem like it would have changed the story. HTC, LG, Motorola, SonyEricsson, and others all released really great phones and they've all been relegated to also-rans. Nokia certainly has/had a strong brand and talent, but brand and prior mobile creation talent didn't seem to save any of the others from getting swept aside by Samsung and Apple.

Yes, if Nokia had made an Android phone and kept making all of the right bets, they could have become a successful smartphone company. But plenty of companies went Android much quicker and made a lot of the right bets and still didn't end up as successful smartphone companies. If you want to rewrite Nokia's management to being "way better than LG, Motorola, and HTC combined", then yea. But saying that just going to Android in November 2011 would have done the trick seems unlikely given that so many companies made better bets than that and failed.