"What if we could unbundle the operating system? I wonder what innovations we're missing out on?" I think the only one benefitting from that would be the middl

"What if we could unbundle the operating system? I wonder what innovations we're missing out on?" I think the only one benefitting from that would be the middleman to test the various os:s against the zillion or so hardware platforms and combinations out there to provide at least some selection of OS that might or might not work on your device (instead of just bricking it right away). A mobile device is not some standard hardware supporting a standard OS. A mobile device is an agglomeration standard or non-standard hardware components, and their hardware drivers, bundled with an OS that probably has been customized some way to facilitate the underlying platform. You can't abstract the world away. OS is the level where the dirty nitty gritty details of running a hardware system are hidden away from the user. You still need to have a platform where to install and run all the device drivers and so on..