There are specific reasons the Ouya and FxOS didn't make sense: an open game-console is already rather quixotic when all the games people want to play are closed-source and open non-games devices exist. FxOS was based on web technologies (huge mistake, given that they're garbage and inefficient), targetted at "emerging markets" (read: poor people, who for some reason are assumed to care less about their phones being slow and not having app compatibility?), and didn't make driver promises. If they had at least gotten calls to happen on a mainline kernel once I would have been convinced, but the real goal of FxOS was market share, not advancing user freedom (where hardware support, not userspace/apps, is the bottleneck). I don't know much about OpenSolaris.

>People buy fast, sexy, bleeding edge smartphones with GREAT CAMERAS (not surprised the whole website decided to omit this, it's probably terrible). Companies that make these phones thrive (see: Apple, Samsung, etc. ) while companies that focus on things only a handful of programmers like (for free)wither away into obscurity, see: the Ouya, Firefox OS, opensolaris, etc.

The demand side is high enough. The kickstarter already reached 800k USD which is 50% of their funding goal. Remember they are using off the shelf components that have already benefited from economies of scale. Selling a few thousand units is enough for them to turn a profit. If they tried to compete with high end phones like the essential phone does then their needed budget would instantly increase by two or three orders of magnitude but the demand wouldn't increase by the same amount because there are already successful competitors.

I don't really know why you think everything needs to be the best and "disrupt" everything else to be profitable. It's basic economics.

$600 * x (variable revenue) = $1000000 (estimated fixed costs for R&D) + $200 * x (variable costs for components & assembly) | - $200 * x

$400 * x = $1000000 | / $400 x (variable revenue) = 2500

So I estimate they only need to sell 2500 units or capture 0.00016% of the market. It might be hard but it's certainly doable.

By the way the phone can be plugged into a monitor and keyboard to act as a full linux desktop. That sounds interesting to me even if it didn't focus on privacy and freedom.

> People don't care about being tracked and they certainly don't care about running some obscure Linux distro on their damn phone.

People care but convenience is just more important to bulk of the population. If something comes out that is equally convenient and does not track, people will pick one that does not track. Even Apple plays the privacy card these days for a reason.