> If there wasn't a monopoly (or duopoly or oligarchy or whatever you wanna call it), then this would have happened.
I...don't think that's sufficiently self-evident to stand on its own.
Fundamentally, it's hard to have a world with more than a very small number of operating systems for the major form factors of device—unless those operating systems are mandated to interoperate in significant ways.
Creating a new operating system for phones also requires some things that are not at all easy to get:
1) You need hardware. This means that either you're creating an OS for an existing hardware platform (in this case, Android or iOS) or you're building your own phones. Given the legal frameworks that existed over the past decade and a half (as distinct from the particular dominance of one platform or another), that basically means you're building your own phones. Some people have tried to do that, but it adds hugely to the up-front cost of getting an OS going.
2) You need to get a critical mass of people using it. Until and unless this happens, what you've created has to live or die based on the apps and services that you build for the phone. No one's going to dedicate their own time, effort, and money to creating software for a phone that only 10,000 people have ever bought.
Now, I can see a pretty strong argument for a new legal framework that would make #1 much easier—specifically, requiring all hardware platforms (possible "all hardware platforms over X sales") to provide a fully-open specification for third-party OS makers to use (with appropriate clauses about dogfooding the open API to prevent the hardware maker from just using a bunch of private APIs to preference their OS). This would allow people to create their own OS for the iPhone without Apple's interference.
But that's not what we've had since 2007, so your bold but unsupported statement that the lack of third choices for mobile OSes in and of itself proves that Apple is a monopoly (or at least that Apple/Google together make up an abusive duopoly) does not hold up to scrutiny.
I...don't think that's sufficiently self-evident to stand on its own.
Fundamentally, it's hard to have a world with more than a very small number of operating systems for the major form factors of device—unless those operating systems are mandated to interoperate in significant ways.
Creating a new operating system for phones also requires some things that are not at all easy to get:
1) You need hardware. This means that either you're creating an OS for an existing hardware platform (in this case, Android or iOS) or you're building your own phones. Given the legal frameworks that existed over the past decade and a half (as distinct from the particular dominance of one platform or another), that basically means you're building your own phones. Some people have tried to do that, but it adds hugely to the up-front cost of getting an OS going.
2) You need to get a critical mass of people using it. Until and unless this happens, what you've created has to live or die based on the apps and services that you build for the phone. No one's going to dedicate their own time, effort, and money to creating software for a phone that only 10,000 people have ever bought.
Now, I can see a pretty strong argument for a new legal framework that would make #1 much easier—specifically, requiring all hardware platforms (possible "all hardware platforms over X sales") to provide a fully-open specification for third-party OS makers to use (with appropriate clauses about dogfooding the open API to prevent the hardware maker from just using a bunch of private APIs to preference their OS). This would allow people to create their own OS for the iPhone without Apple's interference.
But that's not what we've had since 2007, so your bold but unsupported statement that the lack of third choices for mobile OSes in and of itself proves that Apple is a monopoly (or at least that Apple/Google together make up an abusive duopoly) does not hold up to scrutiny.