The duopoly comes about from a few things forcing it.
There's the "it took a while to build it." iOS and android had decades of time to get to where they are now and centuries of developer hours put into writing it. That makes it challenging for others to get in. It isn't impossible, but it's really challenging. For the company, it's likely a loss for a long while before it becomes a possibility of not being a loss. The windows phone was being worked on for 3 years before the iPhone was released and wasn't released for another 3 years... and wasn't exactly a success.
Next is the licensing of the modems for the phone spectrum. That takes FCC approval in the US and isn't something that random companies do without good reason. Part of that licensing is the requirement that it is locked down sufficiently that the user can't do malicious things on the radio spectrum with the device... and that tends to go against many of the open source ideals. It's a preemptive Tivoization of the device.
Assuming that those two parts are down, the next challenge is to make it a tool that you'd use in place of an iPhone or an android phone. Things like holding PCI data. That again makes it difficult to do. Persuading a bank that the device can act as a payment card and that the authorization is sufficient to avoid fraud from either the apps on the device or the user being able to inject other payment cards that they don't own into the device.
I'd love to see an iPod touch like device (non phone) that allows me to run apps or develop my own and build up an ecosystem and demonstrate that trusting it is feasible... but so far I haven't seen many that have lasted beyond kickstarter money running out. I've got a Remarkable ... which isn't exactly small (or cheap). I'd like to see more things like that in other form factors that allow me to do things with it akin to https://developer.remarkable.com
> That makes it challenging for others to get in. It isn't impossible, but it's really challenging.
Huawei made Harmony OS smartphones in 2 years. That said, they were uniquely motivated by the Google Mobile Services ban, Chinese state support, and likely had set the groundworks for such a transition much earlier.
> Reports surrounding an in-house operating system being developed by Huawei date back as far as 2012 in R&D stages with HarmonyOS NEXT system stack going back as early as 2015.
It wasn't green field to release in two years and likely had almost a decade of prep. It probably got additional resources with the Google Mobile Services ban... but even without that it would likely have shown up within the next few years.
There's the "it took a while to build it." iOS and android had decades of time to get to where they are now and centuries of developer hours put into writing it. That makes it challenging for others to get in. It isn't impossible, but it's really challenging. For the company, it's likely a loss for a long while before it becomes a possibility of not being a loss. The windows phone was being worked on for 3 years before the iPhone was released and wasn't released for another 3 years... and wasn't exactly a success.
Next is the licensing of the modems for the phone spectrum. That takes FCC approval in the US and isn't something that random companies do without good reason. Part of that licensing is the requirement that it is locked down sufficiently that the user can't do malicious things on the radio spectrum with the device... and that tends to go against many of the open source ideals. It's a preemptive Tivoization of the device.
Assuming that those two parts are down, the next challenge is to make it a tool that you'd use in place of an iPhone or an android phone. Things like holding PCI data. That again makes it difficult to do. Persuading a bank that the device can act as a payment card and that the authorization is sufficient to avoid fraud from either the apps on the device or the user being able to inject other payment cards that they don't own into the device.
Likewise, things like allowing the device's digital wallet to act as the identification card. https://www.tsa.gov/digital-id/participating-states https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/11/apple-introduces-digi... - those require trust between the government and the company that is likely absent with a open source device.
I'd love to see an iPod touch like device (non phone) that allows me to run apps or develop my own and build up an ecosystem and demonstrate that trusting it is feasible... but so far I haven't seen many that have lasted beyond kickstarter money running out. I've got a Remarkable ... which isn't exactly small (or cheap). I'd like to see more things like that in other form factors that allow me to do things with it akin to https://developer.remarkable.com