> billions in up-front funding that would be required to have parity with these OS's I agree it would almost certainly require a billion or so of investment.

> billions in up-front funding that would be required to have parity with these OS's I agree it would almost certainly require a billion or so of investment. However parity isn’t needed from that investment. It has to be ‘good enough’ (in terms of features) for users, and strong enough that people can build on it. Android isn’t completely free - because Google controls what you can do with it. The point about billions is to notice that how little a couple of billion actually is in relation to the revenues of the companies who have an interest in this.