[throwaway-blaze]

Telco != Techco.

Telcos are cash-flow businesses. They borrow billions with bond sales to fund spectrum acquisition and hardware / network deployment, then optimize payback and profit by taking $80-$200 per account per month from millions of people.

There are smart, forward looking people inside these companies who want to build for 3rd party devs. And they might even get the dispensation from some SVP to start working on an offering, and occasionally one of those makes it out the door to real developers. But ultimately, it isn't a priority for the C-suite, and when that SVP moves off to some other group or company, there's no more sponsorship for the "innovation".

As long as they take in billions reselling Apple/Samsung hardware connecting to Ericsson / Nokia hardware, they're not focusing on anything else.