Dont get me wrong: I'd love the linux phone "rebel" community to be as large as the android one. But... i doubt it will be anytime soon? The problem is getting the hw investment done first.
Android ecosystem is equivalent to windows one: its open enough to sustain a large number of vendors and tinkerers.
I doubt this scare-campaign (OP link) will drive people constructively towards (effectively) innexistent linux alternatives. It's more likely to do nothing or push people towards iOS
I've been a happy user of several of those "effectively inexistent" devices for nearly two decades now and I'm typing this on one of them. Whether they "exist" for you or not is your choice.
I'm doubtful, I for a bit bought a lot of the Pine64 devices thinking about this eg. not just Android/iOS... but the lack of feature parity eg. missing drivers, lack of apps, old hardware.
That's the depressing part. I keep looking for something I could potential run the likes of kde mobile and maybe waydroid on, but there's really just nobody doing this. You are basically locked into a vendor kernel if it's even available.
People forget how much the mobile hardware industry relies on non-free infrastructure. Infrastructure developed by companies that make the standards. You really can't make a good open-source phone because you, pretty much, have to play by the rules of the companies in these consortiums.
It does. They obscure the usage of non-free hardware/firmware by not shipping it as part of the OS, but as a bundle on separate flash storage that is loaded into the OS by initrd. That blob is updatable as "firmware". The 100% free open-source is just marketing. It's just for the OS. A lot of the hardware and firmware is proprietary.
Depends where you draw the line. There is not a single non-free blob in the OS that runs there once the bootloader is up (unless you put some there by yourself, which you're of course free to do).
Android ecosystem is equivalent to windows one: its open enough to sustain a large number of vendors and tinkerers.
I doubt this scare-campaign (OP link) will drive people constructively towards (effectively) innexistent linux alternatives. It's more likely to do nothing or push people towards iOS