Again, I wasn't saying there aren't innovations.
But I would argue that for a company like Apple, their next iPhone release takes priority and will get a significantly larger allocation of their resources than the next OS level feature.
But I would argue that for a company like Apple, their next iPhone release takes priority and will get a significantly larger allocation of their resources than the next OS level feature.
Overall, I think OS research is probably at a more interesting point in history than mobile hardware. There really is amazing competition happening between Linux/macOS/Windows and the users are getting those benefits. Research into secure computation and encryption is being integrated at the hardware level, security research is delving into lots of interesting problems w.r.t. badly behaving programs and also programs that behave correctly but attempt to perform malicious actions (i.e. buffer overflows vs keyloggers), and as lame as it sounds Linux's massive kernel improvements (I'm thinking specifically about their work on mutexes) have allowed them to become one of the quickest OS's in history.
It also brushes up against the question of what we're even calling OS research. The secure enclave was an iPhone first piece of hardware, but its concepts, development, and execution were certainly done by people who I would call OS researchers.