We should have now enough interest on a political level, which can well replace or create new incentive structures for the corporate sponsorship. There are also some EU phones that come with Ubuntu Touch, or Sailfish, like Jolla and Volla phone and a couple others using Android variants (e.g Fairphone) which could cooperate too. The argument with the phone towers is not familiar to me, how exactly do they benefit from the current monopolies?
„UX that was tweaked and polished for decades“, cool, now we know the optimal UX and can develop the first version with it. No need to spend 2 decades again investigating, tweaking, refining, optimizing for hardware that doesn’t exist anymore, and adapting to marketing cycles to get here.
The „is“ situation is not simply extrapolatable, because now you‘ve an increased interest in technological independence. These projects have been limited to a very fringe community of tech enthusiasts and funders, which explains their state.
And the issues on a technical level shouldn’t be too major, Linux is a well proven platform, that works perfectly well on desktop, and embedded devices, and the mobile projects already exist and kind of work. With enough funding and incentive, you could probably fix all the major problems in a year or so.
It doesn’t feel so far fetched to me. People are always complaining about the same 3 technical things: VolTE, call quality and security model. Surely that’s doable? And app support, but that’s the usual networks effects problem that’s also manageable.
As to the different Linux variants, the idea probably would be to develop a canonical model with interoperability standards somehow.
Android uses the Linux kernel, maybe some parts can be migrated or used for guidance, at least. Probably not necessary.
I‘d not be intimidated by the years and money that has been poured into iOS and Android. The years are incidental, this is just the time that the companies have existed and correlates weakly with the time you‘d need to develop from scratch nowadays. They have thrown away a lot of code and years of work in the process and are likely also carrying a lot of legacy code which they‘d happily rewrite if they could start over. AI is also accelerating development. There’s also something cultural there, US tends to fund lavishly, maybe we figure out how to develop more efficiently and perhaps decentralizedly, prioritizing standards and interoperability over monopolies.
Reading the problems here with the pure Linux platforms, why is there no initiative to get Linux mobile up to speed? The EU at least is looking for tech independence, funding should be possible.
For those considering, always remember that you don’t have to „move“, but can simply use the platforms in parallel. It’s a good compromise if leaving the more active network feels too heavy.
Both are minimally disrupted by using multiple accounts. It’s not a marriage.
It’s ok to use them. That’s the strategy. A good way to organize on consumption side is to start with the low-traffic platforms, consume the little content that’s available (there’s something genuinely satisfactory about being able to scroll through all the „new posts“, something that you usually can’t do on the established sites), when done move to higher traffic. And when posting just mechanically post on multiple. It’s just switching apps/tabs, which is almost as easy as navigating within a given site.
We need to popularize the account diversification approach. So people don’t have to leave the popular platforms but allow smaller ones to grow. There are renowned figures that go on and about this „feudalism“ giving long talks, writing books about it and seem not capable of spending 2 minutes opening a new account on Mastodon, Peertube etc. and posting their contents there too. It’s weird and stupid.
Android is Linux based
A big part of the problem is to generalize the worst parts of the respective communities. Yes, there’s people that indeed don’t care about facts, and you’d waste your time with them. But there’s a larger amount of people who do.
The antidote for current politics
There are a few competitive devices that even come with Ubuntu Touch preinstalled.
It doesn’t have 2 of the biggest corporations in the world funding it. Maybe something can be done at policy level to get it up to speed. With Linux at foundation we already have like 70%.
Seems like they have been just sleeping on it.