US government spying has nothing to do with why manufacturers don’t “just use a standard Linux distro with open source firmware”. There are no GNU/Linux (as in,

US government spying has nothing to do with why manufacturers don’t “just use a standard Linux distro with open source firmware”. There are no GNU/Linux (as in, with the GNU userland) distros that work well enough on phones to compete with Android and open source firmware removes some competitive advantage around things like image processing.