There are two camps here:

- it will change, it must change, we want it to change, etc.

- nothing ever changes, because nothing ever changes

Just paraphrasing here. But the second camp is almost always right until it is not and everything changes anyway. Nothing stays the same forever. The duopoly has existed for quite long already. Something is going to change eventually. Maybe sooner rather than later.

In the case of Apple and Google enjoying full control over mobile, this cannot continue for much longer because of the following reasons:

- It no longer is a duopoly. Places like China and Russia are cutting loose from Californian oversight on their mobile networks. So there are a lot of phones with Android but without Google's flavor of it and Apple has withdrawn from the Russian market. In short, Chinese manufacturers are no longer that dependent on Google or Apple to lead the way. Other countries are pushing back as well. And the Chinese are happy to sell to all of them.

- Regulatory oversight in both the EU and the US is putting pressure on both Apple and Google to open their app stores and reduce anti-competitive behavior exercised via those app stores. This includes competing unfairly with things in the app store, keeping competitors out of the app store, and squeezing app store developers for billions of revenue, etc. And in the case of Google, paying Mozilla and Apple for the privilege of being the default search engine on their browsers to the extent of many billions. They have been under a lot of scrutiny for years. For Apple that means their blanket ban on anything not using Safari as its web component might have to go. As soon as it does, there will be other browsers on the platform and they'll compete on quality and features. Like they caved in and added USB-C to the iphone, it might soon have a proper version of Chrome and Firefox running on it.

- Smart phones as the dominant way to consume content might not last. We have other modalities coming up now, including VR and AR, voice only applications, AI apps. Apple and Google will try to "own" this space. But it is not a given that they will succeed in that. For example, most VR content so far comes via the Steam store. Not the Play store. And neither Google nor Apple has made much of an impact with their AI efforts so far. It's OpenAI and MS that are in the lead there.

- There are a growing number of cross platform app development frameworks. Flutter is popular. React-native still is widely used. Jetbrains is positioning Compose as a cross platform option with IOS, Android, and Desktop support. Additionally, PWAs aren't that bad these days and they are about to become a lot more capable via WASM. Some widely used apps are PWAs these days and most of the rest contain quite a bit of web views.

- Networks are changing. We have satellite networks like Starlink and various competitors now starting to offer connectivity everywhere. Mobile operators and phone calls as a use case are a side show for that. The whole point of a smart phone is that it is a phone that connects to the phone network, which until recently was the only way to get connectivity in a lot of places without WIFI. The phone operators control the network, and Apple and Google pretend that phone numbers and sim cards still matter and everybody gets their proprietary firmware from Qualcomm (another nice monopoly). That's the deal for the last fifteen years. That might stop being true soon.