Mobile is a massive chicken-and-egg problem. The main purpose of a smartphone these days is to run apps. Nobody is going to buy a smartphone which can't run the apps they need in their day-to-day life. On the other hand, no company is going to write apps for a platform with basically zero users.

OpenMoko & friends are selling devices which basically only run Firefox, and sometimes make calls as well. The only people interested in that are diehard FLOSS enthusiasts, which means they have to use ancient hardware because new stuff doesn't have open drivers, which means that even if you ignore the app ecosystem they compare incredibly poorly to mainstream smartphones. No wonder they keep failing.

Interestingly, the desktop/laptop market is heading the other way. The move to cloud SaaS products means a decent number of people now only need a browser. What's keeping a lot of people on Windows is often literally one or two applications. Valve's push for Proton is the perfect example of this: the Steam Deck is providing a huge incentive to fix those last few bugs keeping a game from running on Linux, and with the way Microsoft is screwing up W11 it is now ironically the gamers who are moving to Linux.

What you are seeing in "regular computer stores" is mostly irrelevant. That market is basically dead. Corporate gets its machines directly from Dell/HP/Lenovo, PC enthusiasts mostly get custom builds, and casual people stick with smartphones and tablets. In-store PC sales is now reduced to a university student's Google Docs machine - and Microsoft is doing a pretty good job bribing the manufacturers to push Windows there.

> Every attempt since OpenMoko proves the market doesn't care.

It's because people like you are constantly repeating this mantra of security nihilism [0], instead of spreading the word about true alternatives existing today, Librem 5 and Pinephone.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27897975

The list of devices in the highest support category hints at how likely this is. https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices

And yeah, you can even buy phones with a non-android linux pre-installed, e.g. from pine64. But they come with all kinds of "for early adopters" warning labels. Deservedly so, in my opinion.

Why are all commenters on HN ignoring the only smartphone running an FSF-endorsed [0] operating system, Librem 5, and only list everything else? I just can't get it.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25504641

> Maybe 2026 will be the year of Linux on mobile phone.

Considering the ongoing DRAM and SSD crunch, I won't hold my breath.

You can sell the phones alright, and they might even work, but the fact is that participation in society - especially if you live in a city - will be much harder without Android/iOS.

Note, not impossible: You can always carry cash to avoid phone-based bank payments (which would be needed at e.g. my local farmer's market, where nobody has a card payment terminal), some taxi services (Yandex Go for example) provide a web view with some of the features, you can open map services in the browser ...

But for the browser-based cases the experience will be even worse than the standard app experience, and friction is overall much higher.

As a result, only a very small fraction of nerds are committed enough to buy and use these devices. You then have a chicken&egg problem about getting a third option to work.

The only way this has been done semi-successfully in recent years is Huawei's HarmonyOS - and they did it by way of a) already being an absolutely massive phone company, and b) keeping around an expensive Android-compatibility core for many years.

Sailfish OS isn't fully FOSS. I believe the UI is still proprietary.

> It’s a circle that needs to be broken. It has multiple parties even without device manufacturers.

Well, you're right, however badly I don't want to admit it. Google broke that cycle once with Android. I'm sure that Apple would have too, even if they were not the first mover. And there's no question that their wealth and influence had a massive role in it - something an open platform cannot match realistically.

But the current situation is simply untenable anymore. I want out, no matter how many others don't care for it. The open platform has to be just functional enough (including app support, even as PWAs), for us to break free from this duopoly. Just like how Linux and BSDs are on desktops. I'm able to do everything on it from work to netbanking. I would hate it really badly if I was forced to use Windows or MacOS these days.

> We need a hardware attestation vendor

We never had one on desktop; no real issues. Hardware attestation is primarily in the interest of the vendor, not the user. The user relies on chains of trust. This is how the world works.