Just yesterday I saw a post I cant recall if on here or reddit, someone coded an entire OS with Claude Code, I would not be surprised if they invest AI compute at building an OS themselves, though I'd never buy a phone from these companies.
The person got it running on bare hardware.
Found it:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1wfpydl/i_asked_c...
This becomes even tougher if they go the Apple route and don't allow other phone manufacturers to use their OS. Alternatively, if they go down the Windows Phone route, we saw how that played out considering that Google _pays_ manufacturers to use Android
Making OS is very hard, but getting necessary adoption is likely even harder
User: Hello Uber support? Yes, the app shows my driver is in the ocean off the west coast of Africa? And his ETA is -2147483648 minutes?
Uber: Your app, your problem.
User: Hello phonebrain, can you fix my Uber app?
Phonebrain: You're absolutely right, I must have misunderstood the API docs. Squiggling... ... Shuffling ...
Phonebrain: Error, you've hit your usage limit. Please wait 12 hours, or switch to pay-as-you-go app development mode. I cannot estimate how much it will cost to fix your Uber app.
If an "AI Phone" looks to be an existential threat to third party app devs and services, except everyone to do everything they can kill said AI Phone to protect their own products.
To be clear I don’t think we are fully ready for this to work. But directionally the trend looks significant.
I don't think I've seen a phone take over enterprise the way that the Blackberry once dominated, now its either iPhone or Android. You could argue that your executives are safer on a more locked down system. You'd 100% want to get everyone who makes an MFA app or service on your device on the other hand.
RIM essentially invented MDM which is what allowed it to take off in the enterprise, via BlackBerry Enterprise Server. Android and iOS didn't fully unseat them in the enterprise until third party MDMs were up to par and lock down the consumer devices just as effectively.
So whatever new phone/OS that wants to take a stab at the enterprise, out of the gate, must support MDM profiles from all the major ones at least (InTune, ManageEngine, MaaS360, etc.). Then, as you said, all the MFA apps, at least should have Slack/Teams, office apps, etc.
Not that it can't be done, but the cost of entry is much higher today if anyone wants to overcome the switching costs.
No App Store, only web apps, not even 3G, only Yahoo push mail, and tied to AT&T - who were loathed, because in many places they just sucked. And it succeeded anyway.
It was when Exchange push support came in the first major OS upgrade that corporate adoption exploded.
I, as someone who would rather leave the industry than become a manager of either people or autonomous agents, or worse just a meat-based relay, am truly obsolete.
Do you want fries with that?
Will you operate the bread baking machine, own a bread factory ($++) or make eco-handmade artisan bread ($--).
Or do something completely different? Trade railway shares?
Bread baking factories could clearly destroy civilization as we know it, create incredible economic inequality, make a permanent underclass, etc etc.
The whole vibe coding an OS might become a thing in the next few years, but you still have to QA and test it, and there simply hasn't actually been enough time for that.
A lot of software people live under the illusion that hardware bugs don't happen, but they're ubiquitous and it's the job of firmware and OS people to reduce their impact.
Edit: I should add anyone that's worked with me knows I strongly advocate offline fuzz testing of all software components, especially to deal with unexpected states coming from the hardware side. This has proven unreasonably effective, and absolutely is something agents can help with, but they won't solve the whole problem.
Moreover the interaction between firmware and the OS is a massive headache to overcome, especially if you are dealing with battery powered devices.
I totally get why they wanted a custom userland, built it myself for embedded devices. But IME Linux kernel is not terribly bad these days.