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And may be a some other context. Steve Jobs initially only wanted 1% of the mobile phone market.

Nokia wasn't at all worried, they still have a few Smartphone 1.0 design ready to deploy. Remember iPhone wasn't the first smartphone. There were plenty of them before hand. Windows Mobile from OEM of HTC , Palm, Sony Ericsson P900s etc. By the time they realise it was a completely different genre and game it was too late.

Incidentally I remember one of the reason during before and after Microsoft acquisition of Nokia was that there are No apps on the platform. People won't buy it.

But I have been thinking for a long time if this is still true. That was a time when new Apps appears and things were changing fast. People even have different Instant messengers. ( To this day I still don't understand why MSN messenger was not on iPhone. ) But now all the Apps are largely settled. There are a few Social Media Apps, Messenger Apps, Banking Apps which I consider essential to every day users and cover 80 - 90% of their usage. Web Technology, 18 years after Steve Jobs announcing HTML 5 for Apps is finally getting close to the original promise.

Is a third major platform for Smartphone really out of the realms of possibilities?

You should not want a third platform which is as locked as Android/iOS, but the option to have platform-agnostic banking, for example, with the WWW, combined with unlocked bootloaders, so that you can use anything you want.

> There are a few Social Media Apps, Messenger Apps, Banking Apps which I consider essential to every day users and cover 80 - 90% of their usage.

Who will make these apps for the new platform? They have no need to develop for a new platform in hopes it becomes popular, and very few of them have open APIs for the platform to make their own third-party apps.

The platform owner themselves. Obviously it wouldn't be an idea for startup. But OpenAI, Meta, or Tesla could have enough leverage to do so. Or even Amazon.