It's exceedingly difficult to get traction and buy-in. As a freestanding effort, all but impossible. I'm holding out hope that as a side-gig / loss-leader (that is: rather unlike Purism's model, unfortunatley), it might be tractable.

Keep in mind that Microsoft and Facebook failed at this. That former industry giants Nokia and RIM were felled. That Sony Ericson is no longer free-standing. Palm has died.

It's a ruthlessly competitive market with huge winner-take-all dynamics. Apple and Google are the current incumbents. History's lesson is that they will probably fall, but only to be replaced by equally oppressive monopolies. This to me is not progress.

I'm hoping Purism does succeed.

Apple and Google will only be replaced when there is a disruptive innovation in the hardware form factor. Maybe AR goggles or something like that. As long as we stick with flat rectangular mobile devices there's just no room for other major competitors in the market.

Disruption, yes. Form-factor: not so sure.

The first mobile phones ... worked. Barely.

Innovations have come in service coverage, quality, pricing (flat-rate, unlimited calls, is now the norm), early app phones (Palm PDAs making the transition), integration with corporate email (RIM), Web access (from early on, but Apple made the breakthrough), and what really underpins the present mobile devices world: advertising.

It's the fact that Google can haul in about $100 billion a year in ads sales that makes Android viable. Apple is profitable on hardware, but even there, struggles to match in technology (though it's vastly ahead in UI/UX), and has a small fraction of the market of a niche it had created.

Microsoft lacks the ads tie-in, and faces obstacles to positioning itself as sole gatekeeper to its remaining desktop / enterprise software empire (practical, political, legal). Amazon's strength might be in leveraging devices as extensions of its storefront, but that's precisely the aspect of its devices that I found so off-putting. They've all the warmth and personal appeal of a third-tier shopping mall. Though if the company can get that right, and avoid Microsoft's 1990s antitrust experience, they're a considerable competitor.

Facebook's failure may be due to growing distrust of the company and of its second-tier status (after Google) in ads. There's not enough draw to the device, and not enough revenue to support development.

What opportunities this leaves for new entrants is an open question. It also raises the issue of Purism, or any other pure-play device firm's, future. Almost certainly aquisition by some party which is tied to a revenue or related-services or -systems model.

Given the incumbents, my bet would be first Amazon, secondary, if it is truely embracing Linux, Microsoft. Though there might be others. I discount Google or Apple. Facebook is a possibility, though given Purism's focus on freedom and privacy, would be fatal.

Outside the US: most device manufacturers are too strongly wedded to one of the incumbents to make a plausible play as this would imperil their Android or iPhone contracts, which would rule out Samsung, Sony, LG, etc. A non-US telco aquisition, possibly in Europe guided by privacy regimes, could be an option.

On reflection: focus on form factor is almost certainly a red herring. Look to the sustaining business model and positive/negative appeal factors.

Yes, and Amazon.

I'm not sure it's demand so much as extremely high barriers to entry. Android and iOS are both mature and have a lot of features, plus manufacturers like Apple and Samsung have a lot invested into the latest and greatest SoCs and other hardware features. Matching all that right out of the gate and building competitive hardware and an OS is hard, making it difficult to make something that the average consumer will notice.

Tbh, I have more hope in the Pinephone because they aren't trying to be too pure in that they're supporting Android to start but hopefully will allow other OS'es as well.

Doing the whole nine yards (in addition to trying to make the thing blob free) is going to take more than up front investment that other, already established manufacturers don't have to deal with, which is giving them a handicap in a fight they start behind in.

That handicap is also mitigated by a fanatical fanbase who will support a failing company to the end on principle.

You can't say that about most current manufacturers

plus paying for all the software patents

It's nearly impossible to get a "moonshot" phone going that attempts to displace iOS or Android. Most of these projects failed because they went too big. Making a phone is hard enough, but reinventing an entire ecosystem is pretty much impossible.

In my opinion, what Purism and Pine64 are doing is the right approach. Make a low-volume device for an existing operating system, without an additional "platform" layer on top. There are enough privacy and tech enthusiasts to sustain a small-volume manufacturer if you can make a functional device and keep costs down (which admittedly is a difficult problem). It's similar to the current micro-laptops that are popping up, or e-ink tablets. There's not a ton of demand, but they aren't going bankrupt.

Firefox OS at least lives on as KaiOS, more successful market-wise than Mozilla ever was with it.

Fairphone barely (it seems) keeps surviving and might still count somewhat as an "alternative" phone, even if their primary platform is Android.

A new OS is a big task to get to market - non-open contenders have failed too. The combination of an more open phone (which likely comes with compromises) and a new OS just makes the task even harder, and while enthusiastic, I'm not sure the market of people who'd prefer that product is large enough to make it real, sadly.

A modern smartphone phone needs an ecosystem aka apps. Even Microsoft is struggling with an ecosystem for Windows phones, and they sunk billions into them.

“An opensource phone that I can hack on” is a very, very, very niche market that can’t even cover the development costs.

The problem is that it is very difficult for even a medium-sized business to make the economics work for a hardware business based on Free Software. As soon as someone releases a device that even remotely gets traction, just watch: there will seemingly overnight be a dozen knock-offs available both undercutting on price and adding features. Great as a consumer, lousy as a (medium/large) business.

As a result, no one with the resources to readily pull it off wants to do so. Eventually it will happen. Hopefully it will be Purism and/or Pine64 because I'm really fed up with the proprietary offerings.

This is just not a problem in practice. There are literally dozens of knockoffs of the Raspberry Pi (a Free Software-based endeavor if there ever was one!), but none of them with the quality or the support that the original gets.

It's not impossible as long as it can run the apps people use most. In my country I'd guess they are WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and obviously GMail and Chrome. And a lot of games.

None of those phones looked like it could run them. Furthermore it's pretty sure it won't run the next sensation, whatever it will be.

Made a comment below to this effect, I don't think it's mere demand, there are possibly bigger hurdles to making an appealing product that can rival cheapo mobile phones.