I think you're enormously under-estimating the cost of getting UX right.

Creating really beautiful UX is a brutal slog through the tar pits of hell. The amount of testing, testing, testing, testing, TESTING and endless revision that's required to iron out every little nit-picky detail of a user's interaction with a product is immensely time consuming and expensive. You need top-tier designers working for years with large teams of testers, beta users, etc.

For example: I could not imagine fielding a competent turn-by-turn directions app for a phone for less than $10-$15 million in funding, minimum. Then you'd need millions a year minimum in recurrent revenue to finance the endless polish and nit-picky improvements that would be required year over year to keep it competitive with the alternatives.

Tiny details matter. For example, when you start turn-by-turn directions on Google's Maps app for Android, it doesn't say anything right away if you're already going along the correct route. It's silent until it's time to turn. This caused me to assume something was wrong with it or my volume was down. Almost made me throw my phone out the window.

Think about what a tiny detail that is. Google with all it's funding and team didn't catch that. Apple got it right. Their Maps app starts talking immediately, letting you know it's working.

It's a new age -- the age of overall user experience. Features are now a commodity. They don't matter all that much. Getting something working is only step one of ten. The other nine steps are to get it working well.

Creating good UX is certainly an iterative process, but the millions-and-years claim is a bit dramatic. It is definitely possible to 'over-spend' on UX, for example Google Maps was nearly perfect 3 years ago, but is increasingly unusable because "we did nothing, everything is already awesome" doesn't look good on a progress report. The trick is achieving a happy balance of features and usability while not wasting time/money/goodwill in the endless pursuit of an idealized global optimum.

Sure, the UX nail can certainly be counter-sunk. But overall I think my estimates are pretty close.

The thing that makes UX really hard compared with features and capabilities is that there's no straightforwardly "right" answer that can be discerned Platonically in isolation.

UX is a matter of taste and people, not algorithms and code. It's not something that responds to the kinds of Moore's Law efficiency gains that can be achieved in the CS realm -- it requires the irreducibly expensive commodity of human time and effort.

The fact that this kind of time and effort investment is irreducibly expensive is why huge mega-corporations like Apple and Google have such an intrinsic advantage in this department. It's easy to understand why they dominate the mobile space -- when you're interacting with a mobile device, your appetite for poor UX is quite a bit lower than when you're sitting at a desktop.

> huge mega-corporations like Apple and Google have such an intrinsic advantage

They really don't. All it takes is one designer with good taste, or a developer frustrated with the status quo. Sure, big companies have the resources to do a lot of in-house testing and iteration, but that does not suddenly create taste.

> easy to understand why they dominate the mobile space

The reason for the current duopoly in mobile OSes has less to do with pure UX, and more to do with successful jockeying for market position across a multitude of factors (yes, including UX). WebOS? Windows Phone? Both arguably had/have superior UX, but still lost in the market.

Anyway, the OS vendor is irrelevant in this context, notwithstanding app investment due to market position. One can have horrible app UX on iOS, or terrific app UX on Android -- and Android is really not that great overall, especially with older and/or lower-end devices.

Moreover, there are plenty of successful third-party apps, regardless of platform, most of which haven't invested millions and years into UX.

For individual apps and sites, you're right. Individuals with good taste can rival and sometimes outperform the larger companies.

However, large companies like Apple can deliver an entire suite of software to users that has high quality, consistent UX.

This means consumers who aren't used to technology only have to learn a lot of things once. On the other hand, people who've grown up using Apple products already have an idea how to use new ones.

Individuals and small organizations can create some amazing things but large corporations definitely have some intrinsic advantages, especially when it comes to larger projects.

Is making the key options or UX variables open in Settings a way to short circuit these testing expenses? Your OSS target audience should be more than comfortable customizing their own experience.

Well, features like privacy and security are not really a commodity.