Entirely possible, or bought out by a company like Sun Microsystems; it might have been a way for Sun to try and penetrate the desktop market instead of mainframes and servers.
Pulling on this thread, if the iPhone didn't exist (because Apple was solely software), I think there's a chance that the big player in the mobile space today would probably be Blackberry. They were doing extremely well before the iPhone, and if Apple hadn't disrupted the entire smartphone industry, I don't really see why that would haven't continued. I wonder if that means that smartphones would still have keyboards?
Another what if scenario would have been if Apple bought Sun instead of Oracle. We'd have ZFS on Apple devices say 5 years before APFS was rolled out.
As for Blackberry: and Nokia. I know Nokia was not very popular in US (for smartphone), but elsewhere in the world they were. In Europe it is Android which replaced both Nokia and Blackberry.
Android was coming regardless of iPhone. A major thing would be if OSK would be as good as it is on Android if iPhone would not have existed.
But Nokia was ready for the masses with N9 were it not for burning platform memo.
Symbian also had and used capability based security. iOS got it much later, and Android plays catch up on security and privacy with iOS.
Even though what they had paled in comparison to iOS, Android was almost ready and probably would also have overtaken Blackberry. Unfortunately for them the release of the iPhone and the ‘slab’ form factor meant they practically had to start over.
Wouldn't that kind of confirm my point though? In this theoretical universe where Apple is going bankrupt because there's no iPhone, but they do have a decent operating system they're wholly dedicated to (in addition to Sun's previous interest in the system before), might have made it attractive to an executive at Sun.
I'm not saying it would have worked out any better for Sun, just that they were one of the bigger players in the tech world in the late 90's/early 2000's, and I could see trying to break into the desktop space seeming valuable to them at the time.
Pulling on this thread, if the iPhone didn't exist (because Apple was solely software), I think there's a chance that the big player in the mobile space today would probably be Blackberry. They were doing extremely well before the iPhone, and if Apple hadn't disrupted the entire smartphone industry, I don't really see why that would haven't continued. I wonder if that means that smartphones would still have keyboards?