I kinda feel you on this. I am attached to the Android ecosystem. I know two people who have attempted to use open source phones (a rom without gapps + fdroid).

I kinda feel you on this. I am attached to the Android ecosystem. I know two people who have attempted to use open source phones (a rom without gapps + fdroid). They're not _really_ open source as your still have binary blog drivers, but that's as close as you're going to get really. I will give it to them, they were dedicated. One of them had done this for nearly a year, but she started to give up when she found herself writing several apps to replace stuff in that was already available in the play store. At the same time, I would really love an alternative to Android/eyeOS. I wonder if we'd have more open source mobile tools had the Ubuntu Edge succeeded in getting funding? One of the biggest reasons we don't see a Linux explosion on Android in the same way we saw developers using it on their desktops in the late 90s/early 2000s is because you can't just install a base Linux distribution on any phone. Unlike the PC which is a full platform, ARM devices are SoCs where every manufacture attaches random shit to random pins and creates non-upstreamable Kernels: http://penguindreams.org/blog/android-fragmentation/ http://penguindreams.org/blog/android-fragmentation/ Almost every rom we see out there has to have a customized build for each specific phone. Maybe some of this will start to change with Oreo, but I think a bigger barrier to alternative OSes on phones is simply a standard platform.