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Comment by new299 | Hacker News Reader

It's a start.

It would be nice to see more of iOS open sourced. Not everything, but enough to run the GUI and maybe Safari.

I think that could be a huge win for Apple. Lower end, open source iOS compatible phone could attack Android offering, particularly at the lower end. They'd gain control over the market (as it would be derived from their source, and compatible with their ecosystem) without having to do much work.

Honestly, if Apple don't do it, someone should come up with an open source iOS compatible offering, which developers could easily re-target their apps to.

VCs reading this, I'm offering 15% for 3MUSD for the above idea. ;)

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I think Apple (and everyone else) is doing pretty well with their closed source software.

Apple doesn't need others to make lower and cheaper devices. They're more than capable of doing it themselves, they just don't want to.

No, they don’t want to. But I think it would be advantageous to them to not have Android around.

Potentially they could convert many Android users to open source iOS. It wouldn’t come with the branding, I think it could be to their advantage.

It’s not likely to happen, but I think an open source iOS clone/fork would be nice and could also have potential benefits for Apple.

> No, they don’t want to. But I think it would be advantageous to them to not have Android around.

In 2016 Apple got 104% of the entire mobile industry's profit. Not revenue. Profit [1]

I hardly see how disappearance of Android would bring Apple any more advantages.

This year Samsung looks like they might beat Apple on profits ... due to large sales of components "to a major smartphone customer" [2]

[1] http://fortune.com/2016/11/04/apple-smartphone-profits/ [2] http://money.cnn.com/2017/07/27/technology/samsung-profit-ap...

Thanks, the 104% profit number doesn’t make sense to me and I couldn’t see it explained the the article.

How do you get >100% of the profits available in a given industry?

The rest of the industry operates at a loss.

On average.

> They'd gain control over the market

what you described is a loss of control. business is hard.

Apparently this is such a bad idea, that it's possibly my most downvoted comment ever. :)

I should definitely try and get this funded. :)

I'm still somewhat curious why a iOS compatible open source clone might be a such a bad idea. Even if it was from a different vendor perhaps.

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