this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2025
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You need a certain critical mass to enter this market, since you need to be able to get an army of Foxconn slaves to produce the handsets.
No company is going to be and to swoop in and eat those two's lunches.
Hell, even the juggernauts of Microsoft and Amazon tried, and they got crushed out of the market.
Microsoft was already an established player in the smartphone market when the iPhone came out. It was Apple who came into the market and ate the lunches of MS and Blackberry.
I kind of feel like MS tried three distinct times, first with their WinMo products pre-Apple, then with their Nokia partnership, then finally with one last push through the mid-10's before Intel finally made x86 on mobile an impossibility (nuking the Atom line, selling their 5G modem business to Apple, etc) and before there just weren't any paths forward for MS.
Amazon and FB having their own phone product lines felt like the weirdest me-too-also-ran Android reskins to extend their own walled gardens, but also felt like both threw in the towel after like 18 months?!?
MS had to be a loser for more than a decade before they gave up. They were really great at being a big loser.
It's just .. apparent that nobody is going to do this for the love of the game, and that they can only get minimum market presence by financing their way to launching yet another walled garden ecosystem. Which is exactly what we all want to avoid in this group.
Honestly I think they could if they actually invested in it hard enough but they just half ass it and are surprised when it fails
Microsoft spent billions and even bought Nokia to try and be a 3rd player. The problem wasn’t their commitment, it was a lack of developers releasing apps for their OS. Without the millions of apps available on iOS and Android, people weren’t buying the phones.
Yeah they would have to actively pay for things to get ported to their ecosystem and work with developers to do facilitate that.
An investment that big would be a huge risk they aren't willing to take. But half assing it ensures failure.
Exactly
You also need every company to develop for a third mobile platform, where two different ones are already a big ask.
Easy solution would be to run existing apps on Linux, probably would be Android.
Another solution would we move to PWAs to have apps in the browser.
Both these things already happened on desktop Linux with Windows games using Proton and most proprietary desktop apps switching to Electron.
Honest question - why not fork android which already has all of the infrastructure needed for things like 5G handling, power management, and a widely supported ecosystem of components and vendors?
I would try a Linux phone, absolutely, but why not just Android instead?
The issue is current and future vendors for current and future Android phones are largely tainted and lockstep with Google.
But wouldn't developing off yesteryear Android still be leap years ahead of just reinventing the wheel around Linux? I kinda thought Android was Linux for our devices.
I'm mostly saying this just because I'm jealous to bring all of my APK's with me into that future.
I don't want to give up my reddit app and my current trio of browsers.
At this point, I just need a community device. And I’ll gladly pay monthly for an OS that has the basics with a web browser and full privacy.
If Reddit Old would play nice with said device, and doesn't have a native app, I probably will settle on that when my ReVanced 3rd-party-Boost finally dies. (I also use the same developer's Boost for Lemmy app).
I already use Amazon in one browser instead of its app, and Facebook in a whole separate browser on my device, even.
But there are apps on in daily, like my brokerage account and my budget/financial app (Monarch Money is worth the subscription, for me).
I would absolutely pay for access to