[pjc50]

Exactly. All the free market logic assumes that barriers to entry are low. They are incredibly high and the market is naturally prone to converging on a single solution. There's basically room for two smartphone ecosystems. Microsoft/Nokia couldn't sustain a third. Android-adjacent things like Amazon Fire and Tizen have little market share.

> factories having ridiculous MOQs for small-batch phone manufacturing

Ironically in the contract manufacturing area the market is actually efficient. Small batches just cost more as an intrinsic fact about manufacturing. I guarantee you could get a quote for any quantity of manufacturing above 1, you just wouldn't like it.

[mjevans]

Laws need to be revised to make it easier to remix off the shelf components.

I argue, default compulsory license fees should be a feature of copyright and patent. A 'reasonable' cap to the maximum it costs to reuse an existing device / idea. (Also that it should be a LOT tougher to patent things, maybe 1 patentable thing per expert examiner's work week, which would be the cost of filing for a patent. That only individuals should be able to own a patent. That companies could create 'prior art' with academic detail releases.)

[pjc50]

I don't think it's so much patent or copyright as iPhone sits on a huge stack of technology which is proprietary by contract as well. It's very, very vertically integrated.

New Android startups appear now and then. The sort of thing that's achievable with a few tens of millions of dollars of funding. But Android as a whole represents a huge pile of work .. sitting on top of Google Play Services and the App Store, as we can see by the relative non-success of Amazon Fire.

(I was actually involved in the development of a phone-like handset device that was built around phone SOMs from Sierra Wireless. The first minimum order for assembly was ten units, scaling to a thousand after alpha test.)

[whywhywhywhy]

Remixing off the shelf isn't really the issue if you want to compete, it's the fact that you wont even be able to buy the competitive components at all because they wont sell you them even if you ask and have the money.

[dcow]

That’s covered by the compulsory license part of the comment. Say Apple has a patent on the iPhone, Apple must license the iPhone itself to me at a reasonable fee. Then I can go sell jPhones all day to compete.

[mjevans]

I don't think you could compete with the exact same product... the advantage of scale would still give Apple more than sufficient edge.

However if you happened to like E.G. Apple's screen, or camera, or another component that was better than what else could be selected it could be part of a design which competed on other merits. E.G. maybe the touch digitizer is just that much better, so it might make sense on some models of Android or some Libre phone more closely based on Linux or BSD. Or some company that makes an iPhone like device but to GOV spec standards for a given country. (In my mind, I'm thinking US Gov, but IP laws tend to be International too, so maybe Germany wants it's own secure phone.)

[dmitrygr]

In that world, why invest in R&D? Wait for someone else to, and then demand the fruit of the work…

[saghm]

Who are you demanding from if there's no incentive to invest? Either the option is there, in which case the incentive clearly must have been there for someone, or it's not, in which case the incentive is the same for wanting to have it in the first place.

[dcow]

You get to charge royalties and license fees.

[pjc50]

Hmm. Depends what you're referring to - iPhone is indeed a closed system, by contractual arrangement, but Android isn't, and it absolutely is feasible for third party Android devices to exist. Occasionally someone does a new phone startup.

Not especially a matter of patent, just good old fashioned contract exclusivity.

[kevincox]

> the market is naturally prone to converging on a single solution

Not only that it is "naturally prone" to it (with thinks like bulk efficiencies) but also that it is economically prone to it. A free market with no monopolies drives profit towards zero. No company wants this so the logical response is to become a monopoly (or as close as possible) by putting up barriers to entry and competition.

[immibis]

Note: There's room for more smartphone ecosystems, but not mainstream ones. There are a few nonmainstream phones out there, from Linux phones (Pine, Librem, MNT I think now?) to more openish Android phones (Fairphone) to completely different platforms (that I'm pretty sure exist but I don't remember any of).