Comment by deaux

Of course not, smartphones are Chinese tech, and that's the exact crux!

While a massive endeavor, it's absolutely doable to create the EU's own OS and store. It's not doable to create the manufacturing capacity needed to produce all the hardware that goes into smartphones at scale.

China itself ironically serves as a great example - they have their own Android store, mostly run on Chinese phones, some on non-Android OS. Yet they still haven't been able to get rid of the dependency on TSMC/ASML. They're working on it and will get there, but it's taking many years longer than the software part. And not for lack of trying. The fact that they're still tolerating iOS doesn't disprove the existence of the former ecosystem. iOS is said to have maybe 20% market share in China.