[baghira]

People running Nexuses have root on their smartphone, even better, they can replace the copy of android with a modified one (which is really what you want, not people running around with /sbin/su in their smartphone). Granted, there are blob everywhere and running a more recent kernel is hard (impossible?), and there isn't a sensible mechanism like secureboot on x86 to add the users key to the bootloader, but it's not that bad a situation. The problem is the rest of the Android ecosystem, and Microsoft phones, and of course Apple.

Besides, if free software can't provide security, people won't run free software. End of story.

[hackuser]

> People running Nexuses have root on their smartphone, even better, they can replace the copy of android with a modified one

I don't understand: Nexus products don't ship with root access for users, and while users can obtain root access through various methods, they can do the same on almost any mobile device. They can also replace Android with various alternatives on almost any mobile device. How are Nexus products special in these regards?

[dsr_]

On a Nexus phone, the pathway to unlocking the bootloader (and thus being able to install an alternative OS) is this:

$ fastboot oem unlock

On the vast majority of other Android phones, one must perform a customized attack against your phone in order to unlock the bootloader... and on some phones, that attack has not yet been discovered.