[gruez]

>a simpler hardware/software phone needs less resources to maintain

And a such a product is going to absolutely niche, which means no economies of scale producing or maintaining it. You try to justify that by saying it'll be maintained by "the community", but who's going to want to do unglamorous work fixing security issues, compared to developing features? Mainstream phones have dedicated security teams and freelance vulnerability researchers going after them for fame/clout. Who would want to do security research for what's essentially a glorified nokia 3310 that maybe 1000 people use?

[aspenmayer]

The Flipper Zero and its success through direct crowdfunding proves that if you build it, and this next step is equally important to the first, if you build a community around it to directly market it effectively with reversible crowdfunding, you don’t have to wait for them to then come, as they’re already here, right there with you.

[gruez]

Flipper zero doesn't really have a competitor, aside from maybe a bunch of bulky equipment that fits on a table. Such a feature phone would be competing against iPhones/Pixels, both of which are pretty secure and have dedicated security teams. Any new product would have to compete on price/feature/reputation, which would be tough.

[aspenmayer]

The success of the Raspberry Pi proves that existence of competitors is no impediment to success with the proper connections with vendors and with the community.

The OpenWRT One is another example of collaborating with community trusted vendors to build a niche community based hardware product.

https://openwrt.org/toh/openwrt/one

[arcane23]

Ignoring how strangely against this idea you are, for no justifiable reason, it wouldn't look like a 3310, it would still look like a smart phone, probably OLED so more battery life. It would just miss a lot of modern features which are absolutely irrelevant to anyone who wants a privacy/security focused mobile phone. Probably not the latest CPU, not the latest mobile chip, but still decent for what it has to do.

[aspenmayer]

I have crossed paths with them before. Yellow rock approach.

https://danieldashnawcouplestherapy.com/blog/yellow-rock-met...

[gruez]

>Ignoring how strangely against this idea you are, for no justifiable reason

Ignoring how you assert this, when I outlined plenty of reasons which you've yet to rebut...

>it wouldn't look like a 3310, it would still look like a smart phone, probably OLED so more battery life. It would just miss a lot of modern features which are absolutely irrelevant to anyone who wants a privacy/security focused mobile phone. Probably not the latest CPU, not the latest mobile chip, but still decent for what it has to do.

Sounds like a $200 mid-range phone that's sold in much of Asia. Question is, who's going to make it? How are you going to amortize the development costs? You mentioned that it's going to use custom software/hardware to keep security maintenance burden low, but how would that be funded? Most of the SoC vendors are going to be providing kernels/drivers to you with the expectation that you're going to use it to build an Android phone. Good luck convincing them to provide engineering support for your custom software/hardware stack.

Not to mention the questions about maintenance you haven't addressed aside from some handwaving about it'll be simpler and therefore can be "community maintained".