Both Apple and Google have dropped the ball enough with the state of recent releases that some iPhone-equivalent-disruption product from the AI industry is becoming conceivable, though I would be surprised if it turns out not to be running Android in some form.<p>Putting a lot of effort into pushing complexity into software to reduce manufacturing complexity is precisely the sort of thing you worry about when you're getting serious about building consumer products.
> though I would be surprised if it turns out not to be running Android in some form.<p>Just yesterday I saw a post I cant recall if on here or reddit, someone coded an entire OS with Claude Code, I would not be surprised if they invest AI compute at building an OS themselves, though I'd never buy a phone from these companies.<p>The person got it running on bare hardware.<p>Found it:<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1wfpydl/i_asked_claude_to_build_an_operating_system_from/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1wfpydl/i_asked_c...</a>
The issue is getting developers to create apps for a new OS nobody uses (yet). And nobody will use it if they can't have their banking app and uber on it<p>This becomes even tougher if they go the Apple route and don't allow other phone manufacturers to use their OS. Alternatively, if they go down the Windows Phone route, we saw how that played out considering that Google _pays_ manufacturers to use Android<p>Making OS is very hard, but getting necessary adoption is likely even harder
Android has a huge amount of battle tested stuff for running things like media codecs and GPUs connected to devices that are not rebooted for months on end by normal people. (The iPhone wasn't an entirely new OS either for a good reason).<p>The whole vibe coding an OS might become a thing in the next few years, but you still have to QA and test it, and there simply hasn't actually been enough time for that.
The time is ripening to disrupt Android/iOS. The place to start would be to rethink the device around AI. No need for apps or messy integrations with third-party crap. Just a simple device with a great new UX (not typing on a touchpad!) that is slick and does a few things very well (personal agent, coordinating with your personal knowledge base, handling external communications and your interface with the world). This could <i>very</i> easily supplant a phone.<p>AI is rapidly getting to such a place where the you don't really need a developer ecosystem to get your device off the ground. As "plugins" into your agent at some later point -- sure, why not.
I wonder if it might be some totally clean sheet of paper OS design but also capable of running Android applications in an emulation/virtualization layer. I think they know that any mass market handheld smartphone consumer device isn't going to succeed (windows phone) unless people can easily install all available apps from either the google play store or apple app store.
App store inertia has to be the decisive roadblock, and yeah, there would need to be some workaround.<p>This could also be where China gets another win because of their de-Googled Android-not-Android ecosystem which would enable more competition in their local market than can be achieved elsewhere.
But honestly, why do that when there's already a good, open-source(ish), well-designed, highly secure operating system platform that already runs Android apps? Any new clean sheet OS is either going to be worse than Android on one or more of these dimensions, or it will be absurdly expensive to vibe code.
AI cameras won’t be accepted with open arms like the iPhone was 20 years ago. Might as well buy an Android if it’s an Android.<p>For the mass market, the AI industry has a trust problem.