[strcat]

All of those were closed source hardware with tons of closed source firmware. Not shipping firmware updates doesn't mean the firmware doesn't exist. There aren't open source devices in general. It's not specific to smartphones.

[lrvick]

The entire point of Replicant was replacing all mutable closed software, firmware, and blobs with open alternatives and they did to a large degree succeed at that isolated goal.

Sadly this was, to your usual points, at the major expense of security making those devices purely research projects at best and not something anyone should ever actually use.

When you are stuck on a platform that requires closed firmware you are kind of stuck blindly accepting updates from the vendor to patch security bugs, stuck hoping they are not actually introducing new backdoors.

This is why I reject platforms that require closed firmware in the first place to the fullest extent I can.

[strcat]

> The entire point of Replicant was replacing all mutable closed software, firmware, and blobs with open alternatives and they did to a large degree succeed at that isolated goal.

They did not replace firmware with open alternatives. Not updating firmware is not replacing it.

> Sadly this was, to your usual points, at the major expense of security making those devices purely research projects at best and not something anyone should ever actually use.

They steer people to devices with severe unpatched firmware vulnerabilities and an enormous number of severe unpatched software vulnerabilities in the case of Replicant. This is covered up and people are misled about it. These projects claiming to be focused on avoiding backdoors are in fact deliberately backdoored through not patching known vulnerabilities for ideological reasons.

> When you are stuck on a platform that requires closed firmware you are kind of stuck blindly accepting updates from the vendor to patch security bugs, stuck hoping they are not actually introducing new backdoors.

You still trust the developers of open source software and firmware. Open source doesn't result in all vulnerabilities being found, including intentional ones. It's not even close to providing it.

> This is why I reject platforms that require closed firmware in the first place to the fullest extent I can.

The platforms you're describing as having fully open firmware still have closed source firmware.