Creating good smartphone software is not easy. Only Apple has achieved it. Google is close. The rest are so far behind in the race they think they are leading.
Because there was arguably no need for a third option. The current duopoly only exists because it was seen as risk-free, and propping up an alternative was seen as uneconomical.
> Creating good smartphone software is not easy.
Yes, but it's not rocket science either (and even if it were, the EU has both rocket scientists and a space port).
Maybe it's been too long for people to even imagine it, but European companies were fully capable of developing a smartphone OS and running an app certification platform (there were no app stores yet, as the industry was very fragmented) less than two decades ago.
I would argue MS did with windows phone, and Palm and Nokia did too. BlackBerry as well, but less flexibly.
They weren’t commercially successful because of network effects, which I think matter less when your back is against the wall to migrate away from the duopoly.
Android is open source (decreasingly, but still). A reasonable starting point would be forking it and adding replacements for the proprietary Google Play services, app store etc.
Gobally Android also has a much larger market share than Apple. (Yes the US is the opposite, it is an outlier.)
It can be done, but a few things are needed: money. A lot of money. And competent project managers / architects / visionaries.
The money problem is the sticking point; even if you can find investors, if you don't have guarantees of sales you're boned. Actually, this is the other problem: Android is not profitable per se, you don't get an "android license fee" on your bill if you buy a new phone. It's the tie-in with Google's services (default search engine with ads, app store, etc) that make it work. And even without those, Google is a company that originally made money off of ads on webpages, they could do whatever they want outside of that because their primary source of income was so reliable.
Android is a solid basis for a homegrown solution. We just never had the need to build one just yet. What Google and Apple built was convenient. But it's not as irreplaceable as some might think.
That is not a problem of Android but of the hardware and funnily enough much of that is not produced in the US. I think we could cobble together a working phone in a short time and iterate upon that if it is necessary. Hardware has advanced sufficiently that we don't need the latest greatest to have an okay experience.
