> We were so close to having literal plain Linux phones.

IIRC, the dominant position back then was "Android is Linux". Shuttleworth closed his famous #1 bug on Canonical that was their mission in 2013 because now Android/Linux is more popular than Windows and the future is mobile[1]. Also Google still had a lot of good will in the OSS/Linux community back then so most "Mobile Linux" attempts were met with "Just use Android"

[1] https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2013/05/mark-shuttleworth-marks-...

Android may be a Linux but it (if we are feeling generous) sure as heck is not the user's. It's someone else's Linux that they let us run some non-Linux apps in in extremely tight sandboxes.