[silvestrov]

The easy part of a smartphone to create for EU is the part that is done in the US.

The difficult part is the hardware. That is also why the iPhone is produced in Asia. Replacing TSMC is much more difficult than the software.

[petcat]

> iPhone is produced in Asia. Replacing TSMC

iPhone chips are largely produced in Arizona, and TSMC's 2nm fabs are scheduled to come online by 2028. 30% of TSMC's global production is schedule to be produced in America.

USA has been strategically re-homing TSMC to the USA mainland for a long time now.

Contrast with the EU which has done nothing to become self-reliant, and really just has no ideas. It is unfortunate.

[flumpcakes]

Which iPhone chips? The A19 in the latest iPhones use TSMC N3P which AFAIK Arizona is not equipped to produce.

It appears that TSMC are not deploying the latest nodes to US for multiple years after they've entered volume production in Taiwan.

[blell]

Creating good smartphone software is not easy. Only Apple has achieved it. Google is close. The rest are so far behind in the race they think they are leading.

[lxgr]

Because there was arguably no need for a third option. The current duopoly only exists because it was seen as risk-free, and propping up an alternative was seen as uneconomical.

> Creating good smartphone software is not easy.

Yes, but it's not rocket science either (and even if it were, the EU has both rocket scientists and a space port).

Maybe it's been too long for people to even imagine it, but European companies were fully capable of developing a smartphone OS and running an app certification platform (there were no app stores yet, as the industry was very fragmented) less than two decades ago.

[data-ottawa]

I would argue MS did with windows phone, and Palm and Nokia did too. BlackBerry as well, but less flexibly.

They weren’t commercially successful because of network effects, which I think matter less when your back is against the wall to migrate away from the duopoly.

[VorpalWay]

Android is open source (decreasingly, but still). A reasonable starting point would be forking it and adding replacements for the proprietary Google Play services, app store etc.

Gobally Android also has a much larger market share than Apple. (Yes the US is the opposite, it is an outlier.)

[BadBadJellyBean]

> Only Apple has achieved it. Google is close.

Debatable

Android is a solid basis for a homegrown solution. We just never had the need to build one just yet. What Google and Apple built was convenient. But it's not as irreplaceable as some might think.

[JCattheATM]

Apple was behind Google for the longest time, lacking very basic features they didn't get until years later. Don't let the blue bubbles cult fool you.