This is a classic scenario that Linux also faced. Some people might be too young to remember, but a lot of services used to rely on Internet Explorer 6- and ActiveX when there was no chance whatsoever of getting those running properly on Linux. Later we had issues with DRM for streaming sites, which have probably not been fully solved yet.

The truth is that service and app developers only care about one thing: audience size, which translates to actual money. And it takes a long time to build that audience, even more so in the mobile world where all metrics are orders of magnitude bigger than on the desktop. Until Linux phones can show they have sizeable audiences, developers will ignore them. Tens of thousands is nothing, we’ll need millions. Realistically, this is not going to change in 12 months or even 2 years.

But, something can be done in the meantime: making all popular app-development frameworks run on mobile Linux, and then putting pressure on developers to produce app builds. When portability comes essentially for free, it becomes easy to support an additional platform just for the brownie points.