Usually I'm a sceptic about Linux taking over the world, but this is actually the one situation where I could believe substantial progress might be made. If someone developed a slick UI for the basic phone functionality and a genuinely open Linux-based platform, provided compatibility with the major APIs needed to write Android apps so portability was easy, and maybe even funded the whole thing using an app store that took a fraction of the cut that Google and Apple demand, I could see that sort of model gaining enough traction to be viable.

Unlike on the desktop, most important phone apps aren't so large and complicated that they couldn't be ported to or reimplemented on a new platform with a realistic amount of effort. You could offer a significantly better developer experience than either of the dominant platforms today, which would be essential to supporting the apps users expect to find available on any mobile platform today but also potentially attracting some unique and better apps over the longer term.

From the user's side, they'd be genuinely in control of their own device. There could be real security, stability and privacy benefits as a result, and you could do away with a lot of the things that annoy users of current mobile platforms.

As ever, the problem is how to bootstrap a two-sided market. It would probably have to be extremely easy for developers to port their existing Android apps. You might also have to convince one of the major phone manufacturers who can make good hardware at competitive prices to support your platform as an option, or possibly make it easy to install it as a replacement on existing phones. But with the right promotional strategy even these things don't seem totally out of the question. It's a huge potential market, on a scale where one or more well-capitalised big players in the industry could potentially take an interest.