You seem to be misinterpreting the implication. The implication is that the consumer would never ask for what they actually want, because the consumer can't even conceive the possibility of what they really want being available.

Ask an exercise, ask yourself this: if you could offer every iPhone or Android shopper the choice between their current OS, and an otherwise exactly identical one that just wasn't listening to them, spying on them, tracking them, selling their every thought to advertisers, and shoving irrelevant ads into their face all day long, how many do you think would honestly prefer the one with all the spyware and ads?

Ordinary people do want privacy of their data, autonomy over their device. They just feel so hopelessly powerless in the fight that they don't believe it's even possible to achieve any meaningful degree of privacy or control these days, and those values are less important to them than the value of having a smartphone itself, so they sacrifice those values to have a smartphone.

It's not just that. How many bugs or ridiculous misfeatures do existing phones have because the OEMs are teaching to the test for benchmarks or just don't care to fix them?

You were reading something on your phone, switched to a different app for 3 seconds and then back, and now it's an error page because you're in a poor cell coverage area but the device is nefariously aggressive at unloading apps to try to eek out a marginal advantage on battery life reviews. Worse, for well-behaved apps that actually degrades battery life because having to reload the app requires the device to do more work than letting it stay idle in the background.

Separate the software from the hardware and you don't have to worry about that, because they can mess up the stock image however they want for the reviews and you just have someone replace it with a version with those bugs removed.

The average consumer wants a phone with their personal balance of:

* Feature

* Price

* Looks/status

Everything else is completely irrelevant. Now, what features and what looks varies over time. But something as intangible as being 'more open' or 'more private' just isn't significant for most people. People on HN care. Average consumers do not. It's too ethereal and meaningless.

If a new phone or service had a specific certification, like how IP certifications work for waterproofing, then that might change. If it was certified by a third party that X phone with Y service would never sell your data in Z ways.

But without something concrete, it's irrelevant.