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Re:The Librem 5 Development Roadmap and Progress by ocdtrekkie on Wednesday October 04, 2017 @06:16PM (#15405200)
It depends what you call viable. Who's your market? How many do you need to sell to break even? If you're Microsoft or Amazon, you need your mobile product to take market share from Google and Apple, but if you can make a profit making a couple thousand phones for some people who want to buy them, that may be a perfectly successful business model.

In my case, I want my phone to make calls, send texts, and browse the web. It'd be nice if it had some apps, but I probably don't need more than a dozen or two. If you don't need a giant rival ecosystem as your definition of success, it's much easier to succeed on a smaller scale.

Re:The Librem 5 Development Roadmap and Progress by pjmlp on Wednesday October 04, 2017 @07:45PM (#15405763)
As proven by Windows Phone, WebOS, FirefoxOS, Jolla, Blackberry,....
Re:The Librem 5 Development Roadmap and Progress by Brakenshire on Wednesday October 04, 2017 @08:14PM (#15405897)
Most of the failures sold to a general consumer market though, mobile Linux should be able to survive just like desktop Linux, catering to an enthusiastic niche. Also, mobile Linux has the advantage that a lot of apps already use open source stacks, between F-Droid and PWA's there is plenty of an app ecosystem to keep things ticking over, for an audience that doesn't mind tweaking things.
Re:The Librem 5 Development Roadmap and Progress by StudentStuff on Wednesday October 04, 2017 @11:28PM (#15406522)
F-Droid is a steaming pile though, compared to the high caliber software in most distro's repos. Linphone, Firefox and many other apps are months or years out of date, with known, active vulnerabilities.