Almost funny to observe how this comment floats between 1 and 0 points every few hours.

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.

"Regulation" is a dirty word because most regulations are written by captured regulators. The last thing you want is new rules that permanently entrench the incumbent duopoly while pretending that you can tame Godzilla to keep as a pet if only the right chains are used.

You need rules that restore actual competition. Accept no substitute.

The question is, why is it so infeasible to enter the market?

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.

Eric did exactly what you suggest, and found out he can't really build it without permission from the manufacturer. So no, you can't just pull up the pants.

The idea that if the people had the will they would see it through assumes efficient markets with negligible startup costs and informed and rational consumers, which is not the way the real world works.

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?

> But if the people had the will, they could just see it through already.

How does this work in the context of this discussion?

I don’t want Chuck Schumer dictating how tech should work. Most elected officials are idiots outside of the domain of politics.