The whole point is that you are stuck with windows tiles for windows phone. In fact, many people I know think they are dull. Even people who use windows 10 desktop complain about them. They are outdated to a lot of people including me. So it's a niche audience. Android on the other hand is so customizable it can fill EVERY NICHE. There is nothing you can't do on android. So this allows for a broader audience vs. just the windows fans.
OEMs can't even distinguish themselves because MS doesn't have a good themeing implementation.
You're conflating two things, the start screen and interaction method
Live tiles are not dull, who ever thinks live tiles are dull either has not lived during the 90s or has a very short attention span.
People do not remember ios did not have copy and paste, did not have the webos card style multi tasking, it had a moronic task manager where double tapping the home button opened up a horizontal list of icons that wiggled.
As a 29 year old who has lived through the progression of 3210 and monophonic tones to colour screens and polyphonic tones, mp3 players, 64 megabyte usb sticks, floppy disks, 100 mhz pcs and pcs with 1.6 megabytes of ram, crt monitors, push button tvs, wind up radios, dial up and so on.
Icons are dull.
Icons have not progressed
at all from the original xerox UX.
The customisations of Android you are refering is the interactions between the user and o/s however the primary base of ios and Android is still icons. That is not my opinion, it's just fact.
Live tiles are leaps and bounds better than Icons as there is no progression path beyond a snippet of notification and notification indicator + number of notifications.
Which is why Apple added widgets.
The only way Google and Apple will over come the limitation of Icons is by embracing a gesture based UX (case in point the gesture based iphone x) and for that to happen AR and VR will have to pick up in a big way.
What let Live tiles down is messaging towards developers, I recall seeing a developer from Microsoft show casing mix view and he said I quote "with mix view I don't have to bother opening up the app" which is the most idiotic thing to say.
Why would you want to develop an app if people aren't going to bother opening up the app?
Either way to assert Live tiles are dull as fact is simply does not take in to fact there has no shift or progression from icons from 1973 or so.
Let that sink in, 1973.
45 years and there has been no change.
So yes, Icons are outdated by almost 50 years.