The question is more, where is that 'force' expected to come from which should make them change their way? Just hopes and prayers?
In a competitive market, there are a hundred phone OEMs providing every combination of those things for various prices with various trade offs etc.
In a duopoly, there is one company providing A, another providing B and C, and nobody providing D or E. If you chose the company providing B and C, but you still want A, D and E, what are you supposed to do? Reward the company providing even less of what you want?
What you need is more competition.
Assuming it isn't regulation (e.g. patents) getting in the way, you pull up your pants and produce [A, D, and E].
If that's too rich for your blood, I suppose rewarding the company that got you something close enough at a tiny fraction of the cost is reasonable. It is hard to deny the value in that.
> What you need is more competition.
Okay, but if you aren't willing to build [A, D, and E], why would anyone else? These things aren't delivered by angels from heaven.
In theory it should be possible for someone to do this. Phones are made of modular parts. Some companies make chips, some make screens, some make operating systems, some make app stores, so you go acquire each of the parts, make your modifications and start selling your phone.
First problem, the best phone chips are made by Apple and they won't sell them to you for use in a competing phone. Also, they won't sell you their OS or let you use their app store. So it's already not possible to satisfy some of the requirements, e.g. using a chip of that quality or compatibility with existing third party iOS apps.
This is hypothetically more possible with Android, but it still isn't. Qualcomm will sell you a chip; it isn't as good, so you can't satisfy "use the best chip", but they'll sell it to you. You can get Android for free. Well, AOSP anyway. But that won't pass Google's Play Integrity system, so you've already lost compatibility with the existing bank apps. Other Android apps have more dependencies on Google APIs that aren't part of AOSP, so you've once again lost widespread compatibility with the only other market for third party apps, unless you ship with Google Play services. At which point you're not satisfying the "doesn't hoover up your data and send it to Google" requirement.
So anti-competitive behavior on the part of the incumbent duopolists is why there isn't more competition, and antitrust enforcement would address it. For example, break up Apple into its constituent parts. Then Apple Silicon is a separate company like AMD or Qualcomm and you could buy their chips to use in your own phones, the existing App Store becomes a separate entity with no monopoly on distributing apps to iOS users, etc.
At which point someone can feasibly produce a phone that does everything you want, and then someone would.
It is capital intensive, so that is a hurdle, but capital isn't that hard to come by if you are doing something compelling. It was downright easy in the 2010s.
Regulation is the biggest problem. It is straight up against the law to become a direct competitor in computing. Even with all the necessary resources, just try to build an iPhone clone, but with the addition of Y, and see how long you can go before lawyers start breathing down your neck. If you make the first day, I'll be impressed.
You can try to compete indirectly with something kind of the same but different enough to skirt the laws, but that's rarely what the market wants, making it difficult to justify the effort and capital utilization. You need something truly game changing to consider venturing down that road.
Part of the issue is that it isn't just capital intensive, it's capital intensive across a vertically integrated market. If all you had to do was make a phone chip competitive with Apple's, or reimplement the proprietary Google APIs, or convince other phone OEMs and third party developers to use your competing app store, you might be able to pull it off. But when you have to do all of those things and more? At some point the hill is just a sheer cliff.
> Regulation is the biggest problem. It is straight up illegal to become a direct competitor in the computing space.
Oh, that's definitely a major issue. In theory DMCA 1201 has an interoperability exception, but the exception is narrower than it ought to be and then you would have to be willing to stand up for it in court against a megacorp with unlimited lawyers. There is no sensible argument for not fixing things like that.
It would be completely insurmountable for one person, but distributing the load is what an economy is for. If all you had to do was make a competitive chip, and all I had to do was reimplement APIs, and all Joe Blow had to do was <X>... soon we'll have all the pieces.
> Oh, that's definitely a major issue.
It might even be the only issue. China could no doubt start dumping iPhone competitors on the US market tomorrow if the regulatory environment allowed it.
A true competitor will take at least a decade of work IF allowed in the US. I don't think you can escape iPhone Android duopoly in the short term.
You wouldn't need to, if regulations were removed, as you would just straight up copy the iPhone/Android devices. You'd become a true competitor, not be left trying to establish an entirely new parallel market.
But currently, true competition is illegal in this space. Police will be knocking down your doors if you so much as even consider thinking about competing – actually competing – with the iPhone. All you can do is kind create something that is sort of similar, but not really, and that's not going to fly in the marketplace. The market wants iPhones, not something that might passingly look like an iPhone if you squint hard enough, but is entirely different in almost every other way.
You can’t enter the cutting edge phone market easily for the same reason you can’t enter the cutting edge fighter jet market easily. Regulations, sure. Capital, sure. Materials, sure. But holy shit you’ve gotta develop everything from the airframe to the turbines to the cockpit and landing gear simultaneously.
To make matters worse, you cannot just develop it, but you have to develop it in an entirely new way that has never been conceived before, else you will be in violation of endless patent and copyright claims.
But the reality is that the development is already done. No need to reinvent the wheel. It was a huge undertaking, but we've already done it. It is now only regulation that locks it up in a monopoly. Capital, materials, even effort are definite hurdles – but regulation is the reason why duplicating it for the sake of a competitive marketplace is impossible.
But yeah...not a popular opinion here, I know...
You need rules that restore actual competition. Accept no substitute.
> You need rules that restore actual competition
What is the difference between the two?
Really, I'm in the telco industry for 18 years now. The smartphone market is in a way too unhealthy state, especially to properly compete with Apple.
As of today, there is no player in that space who has even remotely the amount of secured income to come up with a similarly specced and volume-scaled device as Apple, and there is little incentive for anyone new to enter this space.
A new entrant would be unable to secure the investment, because even if he would produce the exact same piece of hardware with the same quality, the carrier distribution channels, the brand-image and (walled garden) ecosystem of Apple will prevent users to even notice and adopt the product, and the press would jump onto it and rip it to pieces for not being universally better.
How would this normally work?
--> You disrupt the market by doing something particularly good, while being average in other areas, succeed, then iterate.
But this doesn't work in the Smartphone space as:
1.) iOS users are unlikely to leave their ecosystem because they can't take _anything_ with them
2.) the Google ecosystem leaves little room to disrupt and secure return-of-investment, and
3.) for Android (without Google) you need to (re)build your own ecosystem to _match_ Google/Apple from the start.
That's why it's not a competitive market anymore, it needs external forces to restore an even competition field for Hardware, Applications and Services.
For the benefit of the consumer.
When a market is stuck in a local maximum, an external force would be beneficial to push it out of it.
But who should drive such regulation then, elected representatives which represent constituents who can't be bothered to push for it..?
THAT'S the conundrum.
The market urgently requires regulation, but it also became so convenient so fast and affects end-users only indirectly, so there is no sufficient momentum to drive this change...
[1] Which it is in the case of computing. Intellectual property law makes direct competition against the law.
[2] Assuming a democracy.
How does this work in the context of this discussion?
Well, how would they do that with regulation? Have the government (i.e. the people) tell Apple remove restrictions/add features else they can no longer sell the iPhone/operate a business at all, praying that they comply – and if they don't you no longer can buy an iPhone? –– Which is exactly the same as the people (i.e. government) telling Apple to remove restrictions/add features else they will no longer buy iPhones/Apple products, praying that they comply – and if they don't you no longer can buy an iPhone. That can be done right now without regulation, if the will is there.
But the will isn't there. Nobody outside of tech communities ever thinks about this, and the comparatively small number of tech enthusiasts who do, do not form a democracy. If they people don't have the will, they won't do anything.
Microsoft - a multi-trillion dollar company, number 2 in the world by market cap, second to AAPL and several positions above Google - tried really hard for several years to wedge their way into the mobile phone OS game with Windows Phone, adding a third entrant to the market. They had name recognition, an easy win for integration with user PCs, several compelling features, partnerships with huge, vertically integrated hardware manufacturers, and an enormous base of IP for programming. But, in the end, they failed.
Just because people have a desire for a thing to exist does not make that thing exist.
I'd love it if there were another company - call it Pear or something - that was just like Apple but allowed my Garmin watch to reply to encrypted messages, integrated smoothly with my Windows and Linux PCs, allowed sideloading apps, alternative browsers, adblock, and which gave me a whole lot more customization options. I've got the will. Now where's my phone?
The idea is that if the will of the people is there, they can threaten companies like Apple (or whatever business) to shape up to their expectations or see sales come to an end. Which is also all the government is going to do. After all, (democratic) government and the people are the exact same thing. There is no magic. But if the will isn't there...
> tried really hard for several years to wedge their way into the mobile phone OS game with Windows Phone
They never tried building an iPhone clone, which should have had no trouble finding a market fit. They couldn't do that because regulation doesn't allow it, but without that regulation there is no go reason why they wouldn't have been able to become a viable competitor.
Microsoft's attempt at a phone, and even Android devices for that matter, only compete with the iPhone in the same way Soylent Green competes with hamburgers. It kind of ticks the same boxes if you look at it through a narrow enough lens, but that is not true competition.