Open source software is a slow burn. It takes time, but projects can grow for a very long time even when things seem dormant, and then suddenly seemingly out of nowhere things are actually pretty good. I certainly was impressed with how well they were able to bring GNOME onto phones so far.
It’ll always work best if people don’t consider them to be on the same level as commercial software; it has a different appeal, but one that should not be discounted. Just as there have been so many “year of the Linux desktops,” so to have there been many incorrect calls about the death of it.
And then on top of it you can add all of your Google-alternative libraries and services, which need not be perfect immediately to get people to use it because they can start off running Android apps and buying it for the open hardware. But as you get more users, the software improves too.
Using niche open SoC will make the device slower and/or more expensive. The mass market cares about price and performance.
The evidence for this is that people didn't refuse to buy the first generation of unrepairable devices. Because nobody told them they were unrepairable until they broke, and by then they already owned it. And by then the unrepairable devices were all you could get.
How many people would buy a phone if you could honestly market it as lasting for ten years instead of three and having a lower repair cost when you drop it on the concrete?
> Using niche open SoC will make the device slower and/or more expensive. The mass market cares about price and performance.
The mass market doesn't care about performance on mobile devices. They can't even tell the difference. It's all marketing. Even the phones that are actually faster on paper aren't faster in practice when the "slower" one still does everything instantaneously.
Even on the deskstop, linux arguably has a less stable GUI. At least on the desktop you can drop into a CLI and fix things. Even if you don't know what you're doing, you can google your way to a script and copy + paste.
Mobile and touch is 100% GUI dependent.
That's the whole problem with most projects and why they neither produce acceptable usability nor a an acceptable price point. It's not that it's not technically possible, it's just infeasible without becoming yet another android vendor.
Even just having an 'alternative OS' on existing hardware is a non-existent market, and those projects try very very hard. Adding the hardware problem in to the mix makes it harder, not easier.