What is preventing more companies from creating more mobile operating systems? Are they hamstrung by efforts from the duopoly to keep them down? Or is it just hard? If the latter, should government take action to help foster their creation, like tax breaks?
Microsoft tried doing this with Windows phone, but they couldn't get traction among developers, which made their OS unattractive to end users, which made it unattractive to developers, which made it unattractive ...
Users don't just want a phone, they want a phone that can run all their apps. Developers only publish their apps to the App Store and Google Play, if you want to run the apps that your users want, you need to interface with one of those. This is even harder than the "Linux on the desktop" problem. If you have a good web browser, good support for .exe files (via Wine) and apps that can support most of the file formats users need (notably Microsoft Office files), you have a desktop OS that can replace Windows for most users, no cooperation from Microsoft or third-party developers necessary. You can't do that on mobile, even if you design a perfect iOS or Android emulator, users still won't be able to download any apps unless you get access to a store.
There's nothing stopping a company from making such a phone. The pixel phones from google can probably already boot a regular linux kernel for example if you unlock the bootloader. Then we'd need documentation to be able to actually write drivers. Another part of the problem is how fast the tech is moving outside of the iphones, which makes it harder for anybody to focus on specific hardware.
