this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2026
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It's a kind of "yes, but actually no" situation.
Way back when, smartphones were a relatively new thing. Nobody gave a crap, so building a new OS that had similar capabilities to the competition was easy. We had a bunch of those over the years.
However, every new OS means new architecture, every architecture means developers having to take it into account when building apps.
Eventually, the smartphone market essentially defaulted to Android and iOS - long gone are Windows Phone, Blackberry OS, and a dozen others.
They didn't die off because they somehow had to - they died off because they couldn't keep up with feature parity with Android and iOS.
Nowadays, everything is being made for these two OSes. And by "everything" I mean things that are actually crucial to people - banking apps, ID apps, train ticket apps, parking lot apps - things that they either cannot replace with "not in a smartphone" solution, or can, but it would force them to juggle cards and papers.
Any new OS coming in must take that into account. If Linux comes to mobile phones but can't run national ID apps or banking apps, it will have a market share of maybe 1% - the hardcore fans, and the "technological preppers" who are always anonymous, always off-grid - and that's that. No users further users will switch, and because no users switch, no developers will take it seriously enough to make their apps work on it.
Windows Phone is a great example of this. At its height it had around 20% of the European market share. And what happened? Snapchat (massive at the time) and Google actively worked to undermine and destroy it, because they knew that - in the long run - it'll be cheaper than having to hire a third group of developers. With 3rd party alternative apps being constantly blocked, the OS eventually went down to sub 5% in its biggest market, and sub 1% in the US, and Microsoft finally pulled the plug.
An OS coming in without critical app support won't ever get to even 1% of market share in any region larger than "local Linux fanclub".