Creating good smartphone software is not easy. Only Apple has achieved it. Google is close. The rest are so far behind in the race they think they are leading.
> Creating good smartphone software is not easy.
Yes, but it's not rocket science either (and even if it were, the EU has both rocket scientists and a space port).
Maybe it's been too long for people to even imagine it, but European companies were fully capable of developing a smartphone OS and running an app certification platform (there were no app stores yet, as the industry was very fragmented) less than two decades ago.
They weren’t commercially successful because of network effects, which I think matter less when your back is against the wall to migrate away from the duopoly.
Gobally Android also has a much larger market share than Apple. (Yes the US is the opposite, it is an outlier.)
The money problem is the sticking point; even if you can find investors, if you don't have guarantees of sales you're boned. Actually, this is the other problem: Android is not profitable per se, you don't get an "android license fee" on your bill if you buy a new phone. It's the tie-in with Google's services (default search engine with ads, app store, etc) that make it work. And even without those, Google is a company that originally made money off of ads on webpages, they could do whatever they want outside of that because their primary source of income was so reliable.
Debatable
Android is a solid basis for a homegrown solution. We just never had the need to build one just yet. What Google and Apple built was convenient. But it's not as irreplaceable as some might think.
Except all proprietary drivers tying you to an ancient Linux kernel and preventing upgrades of the OS.
You drastically underestimate how complicated it will be. Here is one attempt: https://puri.sm/posts/breaking-ground/