IF YOU have a new smartphone, it is almost certainly either an Apple iPhone or one of the many devices that runs on Google’s Android operating system. According to IDC, a research firm, more than 90% of the 228m smartphones shipped in the last quarter of 2012 belonged to one of the two dominant species. Android is the bigger beast. Its share has grown as the smartphone market has boomed, to about 70%.

Instead of abandoning the terrain to the two monsters, other brave creatures are emerging from the undergrowth. On February 24th (on the eve of Mobile World Congress, an annual jamboree in Barcelona) Mozilla, a non-profit organisation best known for Firefox, a web browser, unveiled plans to bring a smartphone operating system to market. Called Firefox OS, it has the backing of 18 mobile operators based in countries from Asia to Latin America. Phones running on Firefox OS will soon be on sale in nine countries.

Mozilla is not alone in believing that other systems can thrive. In October Microsoft, which has never had more than a minuscule share of the phone business, brought forth Windows Phone 8. Most Windows smartphones are made by Finland’s Nokia, which dropped its own plans for a new system when it threw in its lot with the American software giant. BlackBerry, a Canadian company formerly called Research In Motion, hopes to recover lost glories with BlackBerry 10, which appeared in January after much delay.

Also competing are Sailfish, developed by Jolla, a Finnish firm that took up work abandoned by Nokia; and Ubuntu, created by Canonical, a British software company, plus other firms and an army of volunteers. Even Samsung is working on another operating system, called Tizen, with Intel, a big semiconductor company that has made little progress in the mobile world. Although it is by far the biggest maker of Android smartphones—and the only one that makes much profit from them—Samsung feels the need to hedge its bets.

One reason for the challengers’ optimism is that a lot of ground is unoccupied. Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a venture-capital firm in Silicon Valley, estimates that late last year smartphones accounted for only 17% of the world’s mobile subscriptions. In big emerging economies such as India, Indonesia and Russia the share is less than 10%. Even rich countries are not saturated (see chart). Brazil, Mexico, Poland and Spain are among the early targets for Mozilla and its partners. BlackBerry and Microsoft have the advantage of familiarity; 80m people use BlackBerrys. Companies’ information-technology departments trust them as secure. Microsoft hopes that Windows’ dominance of personal computers can be transferred to mobiles. With that in mind, all new Windows devices, on desks, on laps or in hands, have the same look, with “tiles” for touching, not clicking. It will not be easy, of course. The sheer number of applications written for Apple and Android is a big obstacle for the new contenders. Consumers want phones with their favourite apps, and developers want to write programs only for the most popular devices. Still, operators are keen that other systems should challenge the dominant duo. At Mobile World Congress César Alierta, the boss of Telefónica, a Spanish operator which earns half its revenue in Latin America, laments “a decline in the freedom of choice of our customers who are locked into closed ecosystems”.

The desire to breach those systems fires the enthusiasm of Mr Alierta and his peers for Firefox OS. Whereas most applications on Apple and Android devices have been written for those systems, Firefox OS uses open standards. In principle, apps based on it can run on any device connected to the web. Let a thousand foxes frolic.