Firefox OS and webOS are still around under different names, which are Capyloon [1] and LuneOS respectively [2].
I wonder which of these projects is most active at this time.
If you look at Google's hardware's capabilities, Android would have flopped immediately.
As bad as the org level issues were with Windows Phone, it would have still beaten Android-on-Google-hardware-only.
I wonder without AOSP or some other major FOSS mobile operating system to shake things up, if smartphones would be more like the PDA industry in the 1990s, with proprietary OS's from OEMs competing with each other. Maybe Palm sticks around and webOS gets a long lease on life. Maybe Samsung, Intel, the Linux Foundation, and co. try to get mass adoption of Tizen, with hilarious results. Though perhaps if Nokia sticks around, MeeGo as based on the Harmattan design in the N9 gets wider use, delaying the need for a successor like Tizen. In any case, with only Apple and Microsoft as their mobile competitors and without Android devices cutting at their margins, BlackBerry still has a fighting chance.
The other possible alternative is Palm WebOS, but I think they were too Apple-like for their own good. The key differentiators that helped Android succeed as an iPhone alternative (wide device variety, more "open" platform) apply much more easily to Windows Phone.
