At least with LLMs you have more options (Deepseek, Grok, offline models, etc.). It's still far from perfect, but it's not as bad as phones where you basically only have a choice of Android or iPhone if you don't want to have to live with major inconvenience (such as being unable to do online banking or pay for parking). It's also a lot easier to launch a competitor in the AI market: you just need capital. With phone OS's it's essentially impossible. The barriers to entry are too high.

> you just need capital

The capital itself isn't going to do anything sitting in the bank. It's used to procure a team of PhDs, an team of SWEs, DevOps, business people, HR, marketing, access to a GPU supercomputer (renting a couple of 5090s off Vast.ai ain't gonna cut it). For, say, $50 million, you could get the blueprints to an Android phone and port your choice of Linux userland and get drivers working, and then do a run of 20,000, sell them for $1100. Compared to training GPT5, $50 million is cheap. If we use an estimate of $1 billion for the whole thing, making a Linux phone running a hypervisor with an Android VM to run banking apps seems not-impossible. (Based on AVF.)

That's not the point I was making. Both operations need capital. But capital isn't the only barrier to entry.

With a LLM, you can spend the money to develop the model, then spend some money marketing it, and if you get enough paying customers to cover your costs and a bit more then you're done. Done in the sense that you're now competing on the same level (roughly) as other LLM providers. Even if it's at a smaller scale, you can offer a similar product with similar features.

With a phone OS, that isn't enough. You need to become big enough that significant numbers of app developers are willing to publish apps on your store, including most major ones (Netflix, Spotify, WhatsApp, social media, banks, government agencies, etc.). Running a VM isn't a full solution: banking apps are already actively blocking usage just based on phone settings that they don't like; unlses your OS does a very convincing job of masquerading as a genuine Android/Apple device you're likely to run into problems (and if you do the latter you might hit legal problems). You also need to convince major manufacturers that it's worth bundling your OS with their phone.

Without those, for a significant segment of the population your phone OS will always be seen as an inferior product to Android / iOS.

You make a valid point, that there are some key apps that are necessary for a new smartphone OS to be viable as a daily driver for the unwashed masses. But that's also just a matter of money. If you roll up to each of the major app's companies with a big enough pile of money, and ask the right person there to port it to your new OS, I bet you could make it happen. (If you don't know the right person, capital also lets your get access to them as well.)

As far as being an "also ran", I mean, that's going to be true for any LLM as well. Your second rate LLM is also always going to be seen as inferior just because it isn't ChatGPT, regardless of any other actual merits. Human psychology is fascinating because they aren't rational. Every time I get fooled into buying some stupid piece of crap because there was an advertisement that tickled my brain in the exact right way, I see just how irrational everybody is, given just the right set of words. Why do I bring this up? We could waste countless hours arguing over the infeasibility of a phone OS vs the infeasibility of an LLM, it's all in our heads, but doing so wouldn't get us closer to the goal, which is dominated by the singular question: can you virtualize enough, and pass through enough of android, to get banking apps to run in a VM on some real hardware, so that dom0 can be debian?