[rchaud]

That's my point. Who is going to create a company to compete with Google and Apple on the smartphone front? They already ran everybody else out of business (Palm WebOS, BlackberryOS, Windows Phone). The alternatives are already here but they don't operate in North America (Huawei HarmonyOS, Jolla OS, Pinephone).

[bryan_w]

Why not you? The beauty of open source is that you don't need to wait to make something happen if you really want it to happen.

[rchaud]

A phone OS is not a hobby project. Just because something is open source doesn't mean there are no development costs.

[gooob]

yeah that's what i'm saying. but obviously the problem is funding.

so do we have enough engineers who care about maintaining useful tools that aren't handicapped or compromised to be able to support this endeavor? i think we do. there have to be many good eggs within these companies who die a little inside each time something like this goes through.

[danaris]

> They already ran everybody else out of business (Palm WebOS, BlackberryOS, Windows Phone).

Only because those alternative mobile OSes were, frankly, crappy in comparison to iOS and Android.

I don't recall Google or Apple doing anything particularly anticompetitive to cause any of those OSes to fail to keep up in the market, aside from just plain "being the 800lb gorillas in the room". (Not saying they never do anything anticompetitive, just that those particular market failures can't be laid at their feet.)

It would be great to have some really good alternatives to the mobile duopoly. Hell, if we had more fragmentation in the market, that would even lead to more impetus for interoperability and common standards—which we desperately need more of everywhere in tech these days. But those three, in particular? They lost because they were worse at being a good mobile OS for most people.