There are rival phone designs out there already. If push came to show, something could probably make it to market in less than a year.
The whole ecosystem thing is another issue. I’d bet that the best way around those would be to run apple and android apps in a sandbox on the new SpaceX OS.
Android is open source.
Musk could fork Android and make the initial phone compatible with current Android apps.
Amazon’s Fire is forked Android. They have crippled the Fire devices by (1) locking users into Amazon’s app library and (2) using substandard hardware. This is why their Fire phone failed.
Other companies have tried forking Android also, but they didn’t have the marketing to make it work.
He should buy the Microsoft Phone software from Nokia and update it. The absolute best user interface ever. Microsoft, as is often the case, gave up on it. Had two of them and loved them.
my understanding is that musk already has a smart phone dubbed the pi phone slated for release in late december
https://smart-phoneprice.com/new-tesla-phone-2022/