Its not really about attracting users though, its about getting phones in stores that users are buying. The market of users that shop for a device, looking for specs and features, is a tiny fraction of the market of phone users, the vast majority of which are regularly ripped off by carriers to buy underpowered overpriced iphones or Android handsets.

If you don't get on Sprint / AT&T / Verizon / Tmobile store shelves you are DOA before you even think about appealing to users switching.

But something like Plasma Mobile does not need to care too much about that. If it has the technicals right, and can run Android apps, it can be an enthusiast platform nobody else adopts because Google has strong armed manufacturer control to keep that kind of competition off store shelves if they wanted to. Its also incredibly expensive to buy market share like that, something none of these participants have the money to do.

It's most definitely about attracting users. When we started OnePlus we specifically set out to ignore stores and carriers and instead focus on making a product that people would love and put it in a price range that made it accessible to everyone. If we had made the same product but instead approached stores and carriers to sell it they would have ignored us. If we were lucky they might have done a deal with us that would have been shitty for us and good for them.

Since we took the opposite approach, focused on product first and demonstrated user traction and sales the stores and carriers came to us to talk and it changed the whole power dynamic.

Every year brings several new mobile brands to the market. Most you will never hear of because they're not exciting or special. They don't focus on making users excited about their unique product, rather they focus on business deals that even if they go through end up in no sales.

But OnePlus still only sells at most a few million units a year - since Oxygen OS is just an Android fork, its still Android, and you don't have the problem of marketshare adoption to attract app developers that any of the non-Android based mobile OSes would have. And thats why I said Plasma Mobile is most interesting, since its not for commercial purposes where success is measured in adoption. The Nexus phones and other devices that are rarely commercially available in stores sell fractions of the units that generic LG and Samsung phones on those shelves do. You can make a business selling a good Android phone out there, but for a mobile OS that needs a good chunk of market share to stay viable, limiting yourself to those seeking you out puts you at an insurmountable disadvantage to getting a foothold large enough to attract developers.

> The market of users that shop for a device, looking for specs and features, is a tiny fraction of the market of phone users, the vast majority of which are regularly ripped off by carriers to buy underpowered overpriced iphones or Android handsets.

This might be so in US, but in most European countries we buy our phones ourselves with pre-paid options.