I thought the whole point was to have an open-source, hackable device from top to bottom.

It's a red flag when you have multiple areas you're trying to differentiate in with one product. Sometimes you can hit two birds with one elegant stone. Sometimes the two goals are so inextricable that you have no other choice. Most of the time, it's just a bad idea.

Yes, that too. I just don't consider Android hackable enough for me. Too constrained by design choices of others.

And there are plenty of unlocked Android devices out there that users can modify already.

That might be not easy. Microsoft have failed to do this as I understand, though they had invested a lot of money into Windows Mobile.

You can escape the Android monoculture in different ways.

Creating the clone of the whole business model as MS tried may be one way.

But I think a single lone dev can probably manage to make an app that will provide UI to call/sms/manage contacts, stream some frames from camera to display, and generally anything s/he dreams up on top. It can be as simple as a single app, that allows to play with interesting concepts like running everything on a PostgreSQL database runing on the phone and replicated to VPS or whatever.

There's nothing all that time intensive/insurmountable about that.

And if single dev can do that, more can be done by a community. I certainly don't care about creating a generic app ecosystem or some such. What I care about is experimenting with reducing the bloat as much as possible, and very tight integration of everything, even as much as having things that are typically in separate apps integrated in a single UI app, with all the possibilities that come from that.

All the more reason.