As it says in the article, the project is no-where complete in a sense where you can just use it as your day to day smartphone OS, so it does not "fix" this yet

As it says in the article, the project is no-where complete in a sense where you can just use it as your day to day smartphone OS, so it does not "fix" this yet. The project has just started, but there is a solid base with "pmbootstrap" now. Replicant is working on reverse engineering the userspace drivers (they also found a backdoor in the closed-source drivers by doing that btw): https://redmine.replicant.us/projects/replicant/wiki/Samsung-RIL https://redmine.replicant.us/projects/replicant/wiki/Samsung... Other people are working on mainlining the kernel drivers for certain devices: https://lwn.net/Articles/680109/ https://lwn.net/Articles/680109/ So there is hope, and we need to start somewhere.