Niche Phone Viability
The cluster focuses on skepticism toward niche, open-source, modular, or alternative mobile phones and OSes, discussing challenges like market size, supply chain issues, high costs, competition from Android/iOS giants, and failure of past projects like Project Ara.
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It’s still a “fancy” or too niche a phone. It neither has the reach, nor the supply chain backbone. By the time it reaches critical operational/business mass phone landscape would have had changed. Just like it’ll happen with frame.work.
Android manufacturers not understanding market.
You mean like Project Ara? If google couldn't make it profitable idk how anyone smaller could.
That's just wishful thinking. No manufacturers would release any devices with this OS for the following reasons:Phones are commodity devices where volumes have to be high and costs low.The big manufacturers that have the resources to make and sell something like this at scale(i.e. Samsung) want you tied in their ecosystem instead.Maybe some niche manufacturer could make a device with this via crowdfunding but the price would be too high for such a low volume as the niche of techies
Open source phones exist. So why aren't they taking off?
Sounds kind of desperate to me. Why don't they finish up their own phone platform?
I think the problem is that the demographics are already niche for the existing Linux on mobile software ecosystem on a device with as many software issues as it has. Then the issue of what little extra money they could make doesn't make it easier to find components that match their philosophy, much less performant parts, making a high price an even harder sell. I like their current strategy and it seems to be working for them. Slowly build an audience while helping the ecosystem to develop
Why not making a phone and enter mobile market?
It's nearly impossible to get a "moonshot" phone going that attempts to displace iOS or Android. Most of these projects failed because they went too big. Making a phone is hard enough, but reinventing an entire ecosystem is pretty much impossible.In my opinion, what Purism and Pine64 are doing is the right approach. Make a low-volume device for an existing operating system, without an additional "platform" layer on top. There are enough privacy and tech enthusiasts to
Ok that does sound valuable. But maybe too much of a niche. Most people are fine with the OS apple/Samsung ship with the phone.