[Silhouette]

Usually I'm a sceptic about Linux taking over the world, but this is actually the one situation where I could believe substantial progress might be made. If someone developed a slick UI for the basic phone functionality and a genuinely open Linux-based platform, provided compatibility with the major APIs needed to write Android apps so portability was easy, and maybe even funded the whole thing using an app store that took a fraction of the cut that Google and Apple demand, I could see that sort of model gaining enough traction to be viable.

Unlike on the desktop, most important phone apps aren't so large and complicated that they couldn't be ported to or reimplemented on a new platform with a realistic amount of effort. You could offer a significantly better developer experience than either of the dominant platforms today, which would be essential to supporting the apps users expect to find available on any mobile platform today but also potentially attracting some unique and better apps over the longer term.

From the user's side, they'd be genuinely in control of their own device. There could be real security, stability and privacy benefits as a result, and you could do away with a lot of the things that annoy users of current mobile platforms.

As ever, the problem is how to bootstrap a two-sided market. It would probably have to be extremely easy for developers to port their existing Android apps. You might also have to convince one of the major phone manufacturers who can make good hardware at competitive prices to support your platform as an option, or possibly make it easy to install it as a replacement on existing phones. But with the right promotional strategy even these things don't seem totally out of the question. It's a huge potential market, on a scale where one or more well-capitalised big players in the industry could potentially take an interest.

[bashinator]

Didn’t Canonical try to do something like this?

[nitrogen]

It sounds a lot like Nokia's Maemo, which was doomed by a lack of investment, subsequent renaming to ugly-sounding names, and bouncing back and forth between orgs after Microsoft's agent provocateur sabotaged Nokia's phone division.

[pjmlp]

Correction, Nokia board did that to themselves after hiring Elop and having a contract that would give him a nice bonus if he managed to do what he naturally end up doing.

As much as FOSS crowd loves to hate Microsoft, better get the facts right.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/stephen-elop-to-get-25-5m-f...

[dogma1138]

At that point what’s the difference between this and Android, unlock your bootloader, download AOSP and hack away...

[cle]

For me a big difference would be not sending my data to Google. Even Lineage OS still sends a bunch of data to Google all the time. If you’re not careful it sends location data, DNS queries, etc.

I want a mobile OS that gives me complete control over my personal data.

[dogma1138]

AOSP.

[Silhouette]

At that point what’s the difference between this and Android

How many major phones can you buy with AOSP installed by default today?

How much development gets done on AOSP that isn't at least heavily influenced by the direction Google takes?

Does AOSP provide comprehensive privacy and security options for users but still freely connect with other devices and services using open standards?

Obviously if you're going to be Linux-based and if we're assuming some degree of compatibility with Android APIs to make porting apps easy then there is going to be common ground with AOSP, but I don't think that makes it the only or necessarily the best option.

[dogma1138]

But that’s just the issue we already have most of this freedom available yet hardly anyone takes advantage of it.

Heck how many people do you think install SailFish on their phones? You can buy pretty decent Android phones with AOSP and even SailFishOS builds yet people aren’t taking advantage of that in any particular manner.

If almost no one uses it, even amongst those who claim they want that freedom why will build a business model around it?