> Do you legitimately believe that someone is just going to go and write a new mobile operating system?
Lots of people have done this. Moreover, several of the existing ones (including Android) are mostly or entirely open source, so you can start from that base if you have something to add.
But then these alternatives fail to gain traction, why? If all you did was take Android and remove the spying bits from it, that should be popular. People should be wiping their phones and installing that the second they buy one, or having their tech friends do it for them, the same as people do with a clean install of Windows to remove the OEM crapware that comes with a new PC. And yet they don't.
Because there are locked bootloaders, remote attestation, widespread third party app dependencies on Google Play services, undocumented hardware with kernel-specific binary blobs, etc. If you do a Google search on how to install a custom ROM, Google's AI summary thing will show up to warn you that hardly anybody does that and if you do there are security risks, leaving people to imagine that if you do it some Russians are going to steal your car, wipe out your bank account and cause you to get fired, even though what "security risks" it entails are not actually specified.
It almost goes without saying that Apple is even worse here.
It's not because nobody wants to do it. There are millions of people who even put up with that level of friction and make it happen regardless. But the barriers inhibit adoption by normies and keep the alternatives in the small minority, which is the issue, because these things have a network effect and need a threshold amount of scale to become viable.
But Apple sells more than phones: it also sells keyboards, mice, external trackpads, wireless headphones, and connected watches. Notably, Pebble had some significant issues recently (https://mashable.com/article/pebble-smartwatch-back), because they were not allowed to use the same connectivity functionality of the iPhone that the Apple Watch does. Non-apple headphones don’t and can’t support handoff.
Apple is using their market position in the smartphone space to bolster their products, and hamper competing products, in their other product categories.
