[zrm]

> For any critical tech platform, though, has there ever been more than 2 major players?

Here's a partial list of major server operating system vendors over the years: IBM, Sun, HP, Red Hat, Novell, Microsoft ...

Everyone one of those has existed since at least the 1990s and it's rare for the largest individual vendor to have more than 30% share at any given time.

The key to maintaining this is common interfaces. You write against POSIX or Qt or Java and it runs on most systems even though they're all different vendors.

But all of that stuff comes from the little guys. All the Unix vendors got together to create POSIX because then developers get access to more users by targeting POSIX than Win32, even though Windows at the time had more market share than any individual Unix. Sun creating Java allowed developers with mostly Windows customers to write their Windows applications in Java, which then gave them Mac and a dozen other platforms for free, including Sun Solaris, which the developer probably wouldn't have targeted on its own.

The phone hardware vendors could take a page out of that book and create their own modern POSIX for mobile to replace the Google-specific APIs on Android. Heck, they would only need one implementation of it, the same as all the old Unix vendors have largely standardized on Linux today.