> Want a better situation? Build a new and better ecosystem.

The problem is it's chicken and egg. To get users you need apps, to get app developers you need users. To overcome that you don't just need something which is as good as the status quo, you need something so much better that people will switch to it despite the apps conundrum.

Apple got there by being first to market with a modern smartphone. Google got there by undercutting the competition on price. Neither of those are a possible path for a new competitor. They can't be first to market anymore, and they can't undercut Android on price because its price is already zero.

The usual way underdog platforms avoid this is by establishing compatibility with the competitor's apps. Sun created Java so that people would write their apps in Java, which would then run on Solaris/SPARC as well as Windows/Intel. Wine allows Windows programs to run on Linux.

But that doesn't work here either, because of the very problem the new platform would be needed to solve. Even if you created a competing platform that could run Android apps or iOS apps, it wouldn't have Google or Apple's store, which is where all the existing apps are. The user of your new platform can't go to the developer's website to get the existing app and run it on your new platform because the existing platforms don't allow apps to be distributed that way. So you have to convince all the existing developers to use your store, and avoid use of Google Play Services etc., before you have any users that would give developers the incentive to spend their time doing that.

Moreover, the incumbents are vertically integrated. If I think I can make a better OS than Apple, to capture their customers I don't just need to convert all their developers, I also have to make competitive hardware. Where do I get the money to develop a CPU competitive with Apple's? I would have to be a company as big as they are to do that, or bigger to overcome the advantages of incumbency, but nobody is as big as Apple. Microsoft, which is nearly as big, tried and failed. Amazon's Fire line is just an Android fork running on commodity hardware.

Who do you propose has the resources to unseat the incumbents at this point?

> I see a lot of devs/publishers complaining and not a lot of users.

That's a big part of the problem -- the users lack visibility into the inner workings. How many iPhone customers even realize that competing stores are prohibited, or that Apple bans things they may want? They don't see the apps they want that Apple prohibits, because when they're prohibited they don't exist. When they're prohibited the developers are starved of access to their own customers and destroyed, or never exist to begin with, which means they can't campaign to the users for their inclusion.

The developers can't even show the users how much they're paying, or offer discounts for purchases made through other channels, because Apple prohibits it.

So of course it's the developers complaining, because they're the ones who can see what's happening behind the scenes. But the users are still being harmed, even if that's being hidden from them.

And the lack of user awareness is another impediment to establishing a new competing platform.