I would suggest taking a look at the Purism Librem 5. Not because of whatever its own software stack will end up being, but because it'll help provide a basis for developing more FOSS software for phones. HiDPI support in Linux became polished and viable shortly after a couple of companies arranged for desktop developers to get a few of the first-generation Chromebook Pixel devices, with a 2560x1440 screen. And similarly, I expect support for the mobile touch experience and phone capabilities to drastically improve when developers have a device to work with.

I hope something can be done to support a stronger software ecosystem on this platform. Every previous attempt has failed. HTML5 and even Android emulation aren't good enough either. I'll likely switch to this regardless, but there are some key apps that people want that just weren't around on any of these alternative platforms. Not even Microsoft could pull it off with Windows 10.

HTML5 is very nearly good enough for a huge number of applications, even more so if Firefox supports MWAs on the platform.

Android emulation would be an interesting stopgap.

What are examples of "key apps" that neither of those would cover?

Uber/Lyft, whatever social media apps are popular at the time (facebook, snap, twitter, instagram, whatsapp, and periscope at the moment, probably), banking apps, high quality navigation app (a lot of people would never give up either Google Maps or Waze). There's probably more I'm not aware of, as I've never been a particularly heavy app user. But with things like Amazon moving into groceries etc I wouldn't be surprised if more and more software gets tied up in proprietary mobile platforms. Even if most of those applications could be done in HTML5, most of them are not, and I highly doubt you could make them that way without significant UX compromises.

Note that when I said "key apps that neither of those would cover", I was including the stopgap of Android app emulation in that.

> Uber/Lyft

Uber has a mobile site at m.uber.com, and of course both would work via Android app emulation as a stopgap.

> whatever social media apps are popular at the time

Facebook and Twitter both have mobile sites, as do various others, and all of those would work via Android app emulation as a stopgap. There are also several native Linux clients for many of those.

> banking apps

Most bank sites (and credit card sites) work fine in a mobile browser. The only feature that commonly doesn't work is check deposit by camera, and there's no good reason for that. But in any case, Android app emulation would cover those for that use case.

> high quality navigation app (a lot of people would never give up either Google Maps or Waze).

Google Maps works perfectly via the web.

> But with things like Amazon moving into groceries

Both Amazon and Prime Now work perfectly via the websites, without needing an app.

To add a few you didn't mention: YouTube has a perfectly functional mobile version; Netflix and Amazon Prime Video should work fine on a mobile browser (insert standard objection that EME is not appropriate for the web); Slack and Discord work via the web; there are several native calendaring apps (though they'll need some mobile UX improvement) as well as web apps.

I absolutely agree that the experience needs some work and polish; that's what I'm hoping to see happen in the next few years. That said, what I'm looking for are things that aren't possible via either HTML5 or Android emulation.

Agreed. I started with WebOS (Pre was my first smartphone), then HP happened. So I jumped to Blackberry 10, then their new CEO moved them to Android. So now now I am a reluctant Android user, because I find it only slightly less invasive than iOS. Very disappointed that this is the state of mobile computing landscape going into 2018.

> So now now I am a reluctant Android user, because I find it only slightly less invasive than iOS.

That's surprising, I'd say Android is many times more invasive than iOS. iOS tends to lean towards on-device features where Android will happily send excessive amounts of your data to their servers to make "neat" features work.

I switched to an iPhone because of this. I may not know everything that's going on behind the scenes with my phone, and I may not be able to tweak the hell out of it, but I do know that Apple's entire business isn't built around using personal info to sell ads. That's reason enough to stick with them if I really care about privacy/invasiveness. I'm sure they're not perfect either, but I just really do not trust Google anymore.

On the other hand you cannot install what you want on iOS. They both suck in their own sweet way.

I remember about 5 years ago I was telling friends on day we wouldn't be able to root flagships (that was back when root exploits were common enough). They laughed me off, but here we are with more flagships than not never getting root.

Android's getting locked down, and GPS is getting more and more integral to Android's functions (stuff like needing FCM for communicating with a device in Doze mode).

I'd still say iOS is more locked down, but iOS has side loading

How is it less invasive? Isn't Apple and iOS big on not sending your data out as much as possible? While Android isn't like that at all?

I do miss webOS a great deal though. Same with Windows Mobile which I used for a year.

The postmarketOS [1] project is trying to fix that. It's effectively creating a unified base layer on top of phones without any Android libraries. There are also lots of efforts to add UIs and other packages as well. In addition, there's a handful of devices that have actually been ported to use the mainline kernel.

By no description is it ready for daily-driver use, but there's been a lot of progress for a project less than a year old.

[1] http://postmarketos.org

Someone could take Aros, Haikuos, Reactos, or even something else and port it to ARM platforms with a touchscreen.

I remember someone tried a Commodore themed smart phone.

But the iOS and Android duopoly makes it hard for third parties to compete against a mountain of apps verses the few apps third parties have, not to mention development tools.

For 7 years i have been searching for the perfect phone but everytime the phones grow bigger and more touchy. Maybe a gameboy styled modular phone could do the needful,but the touch phone era has dashed all my dreams of having a compact phone with tactile keys. Hopefully the the next year will be better

Have you looked into keyboard cases for phones? Something thin like an iPhone + a relatively thin kb case can't be much thicker than your average smartphone with an otterbox.

edit: actually, now that I'm looking, they really only seem to exist for older iPhones (pre-6) :(

Why would a company that designs integrated systems want that kind of standardization? It doesn't seem to be in their economic interest at all. Can you make a convincing argument for it?

The only argument would be that the people are demanding it. And so far very few of us are. (I’d love standard hardware!)