Yes, and I am more convinced that the market for non-iOS and non-Android mobile devices will grow.

Not sure if its going to be GrapheneOS, or Linux — But we can witness the growing trend of privacy-focus — especially after AI being introduced on the OS layer — grabbing recurring screenshots, uploading to clouds, and essentially destroying E2E encryption.

It'll grow, but its share of the market probably won't. People don't care. Anyone who cares enough to do something is a minority of a minority.

It is becoming very expensive and difficult as the moats these companies have been able to build are enormous.

One upside I see is that phone hardware slowed in innovation and most changes are now software. This allows a new comer to build a phone over 2 years and have specs that are still good enough. This was a huge issue back a few years ago when a "kickstarter" was created and two years later the phone was unusable because of the poor hardware specs.

I'm dreaming of that as well. But non-Android will always be against the chipset manufacturers not giving any documentation or software to anyone except NDA'd companies that follow their reference implementation exactly.

Google is also busily planning to kill sideloading and changes to the OS one step at a time.

Also, Graphene is Android. Just a nice distribution of, for pixels.

The market you describe only exists if there's a wide swath of people who are informed enough about their data privacy that they care enough to act.

Look around. This isn't going to happen, unfortunately.

I think you are too hopeful. I doubt the majority cares, will know about it, or even believe it. They will not care until it bites them in the ass and they know why it was.