Comment by GalenErso | Hacker News Reader

Comment by GalenErso | Hacker News Reader

First mover advantage. Android and iOS are too entrenched. It would take one of those to lose its competitive edge, like Facebook did versus Tiktok. Or for Europe to borrow a page from China and force their citizens to use this European mobile operating system while shielding it from outside competition, until perhaps it gains enough traction worldwide to challenge the dominance of the other two.

It's the same story across industries. Europe missed the fifth generation fighter aircraft boat, so now everyone is buying F-35s. Even if FCAS and Tempest ever get off the ground, the F-35 will be too entrenched in allied air forces to be dislodged.

Rockets too. Europe missed the reusable rocket boat, and now SpaceX is eating the Ariane's lunch, for the most part, except for politically sensitive European projects for which they still use more expensive Ariane launchers. The rocket market is more prone to disruption however, because launches are a one-and-done kind of thing. Switching launch provider is easier than switching operating system or the composition of an air fleet.

First mover advantage.

Microsoft, BlackBerry, Symbian, Nokia, Palm. They all 'moved' before Android and iOS and at various points in time where the leading players in their market segments. Yet they all rested on their laurels and fell to Android and iOS.

iOS is really the game changer that brought a new paradigm of using a computer in your pocket. Andriod is a just copy of iPhone/iOS.

iOS is really the game changer

Agreed, but not by being first. Apple won by waiting till the time was right, all the technology was mature and then executing everything better than everybody else. And if we look across the past decade or so we'll find plenty of times that Apple and iOS copied features first seen in Android phones.

I think that, if you look at the first iPhone, the technology was not at all “mature”. The first versions had some decidedly undesirable workarounds in both hardware and software. There’s even an interesting argument that Apple’s reliance on a somewhat outdated, non-“modern” language (ObjC) was an advantage when switching to low powered mobile hardware. What Apple did was succeeded in a more concept driven paradigm change - usable soft keyboard, multi touch, usable “full web” browser. Also rejecting dubious technologies like Flash that were considered de facto at the time. Basically packaging standard technologies into a far better conceived whole. This was their successful business model for a long time. It’s only recently that Apple has been leading technology in terms of innovation, and that only happened once they became so dominant, which only happened after the iPhone

> Andriod is a just copy of iPhone/iOS.

And a lot of EU and CN "start ups" are just copies of well known US companies

The EU is a big enough market to strong-arm manufacturers and developers into suppporting their OS:

- an extra import duty on phones not running EU OS unless an equal number of EU OS phones is imported - all EU-sponsored projects must run on EU OS - if you're a software dev in the EU making phone apps, you get a tax break if you support EU OS - and so on

Neither android nor iOS are the first movers though. They both came after the other players were already struggling trying to make it happen without reaching critical mass.

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