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by FirmwareBurner
1040 days ago
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>A semi-niche device that is also a reliable "Don't need to upgrade hardware for a decade" option definitely has its place in the market, it just won't ever exceed 5% of the market... which would place it exactly where Linux desktop is. It won't even reach 5% of the market, when it will cost more than a mass produced cheapo Android device, be uglier, have less battery life, and take worse photos along with not being mainstream available in shops. FOSS phones already exist, and nobody is buying them other than Linux youtube reviewers (and they aren't daily driving them either), because they cost as much as half-decent phones, while being a lot worse and not supporting the major apps that people use to communicate with normies (what people mostly use their phones for). The amount of consumers who value a FOSS phone over everything else is a lot less than 5% of the market. It's an extremely niche market. |
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Ecosystem fracture and uncertainty of LTS are _The_ reasons I don't have a Foss phone. Full stop.
A coordinated drive behind a few hardware designs and an independent central org (think GNU/FSF) that effectively guarantees at least one OS option exists for the device lifetime are the keys to the goal.
Having that allows others to build thier variants.
We can't have a Foss phone built using phones which are explicitly built for a specific OS (android) and without having the drivers for components open source (to ensure anyone can patch it etc).
And look at the drive to "dumb" phones currently occurring specifically because people are tired of the "this device doesn't support the current version of android" bs... there are far more people in the potential customer pool than ever existed with PCs (where you have historically been able to upgrade for a decade+ before hardware was simply unable to support the software).