| Because phones inherit from an old business model where they were subsidized by mobile network operators and thus manufactured and sold according to their needs, not to the users need. This meant you'd have many restrictions and the user was constrained to a tightly-controlled environment that forbode anything the operator deemed unnecessary (and could even contain malware/spyware-like pre-loaded software). That model gradually evolved into J2ME platforms (and the like), where developers (and sometime users) could make small customizations, until someone decided there was a huge market selling phones designed not for the operators but for their customers (i.e. Apple/Google). They still built the product partly following the same mindset/model and provided VM-centric phones that still are not designed to give you ring-0 access from the get go and maximize the operator's & manufacturer control on your device, hoping to gain revenues from gated developer communities, reselling applications that are mostly yet another graphical layer on top of code that already exists natively on regular computers since a long time ago. That model is gradually evolving (hopefully in the right direction) and operators are slowling realizing that they're not device vendors but merely ISPs, which means that the phones are to be sold to customers, centered around their needs and giving them the maximum control (letting them chose the OS and giving them ring0 access). You still need to get rid of the protected baseband cpu, the SIM, the TEE, the protected bootloaders etc. and eventually might have the device that you speak about. |
Only in the US.