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Well, I think that it could be argued that GNU, and Xorg, and GTK, and all the rest, wasn’t the best foundation to build on in 2003. At a minimum, it would have

Well, I think that it could be argued that GNU, and Xorg, and GTK, and all the rest, wasn’t the best foundation to build on in 2003. At a minimum, it would have required so much modification to run on mobile phones, that combined with the license (remembering that Android was originally a small company not part of Google), would not have led to a viable business model or platform. Even today, Xorg would be a terrible fit for a mobile device, and most embedded devices don’t use GNU.

ndiddy 2y ago
The Nokia N900 was a production mobile phone that ran Linux (Debian-based) with a GNU userland, Xorg, and a GTK+ based graphical environment. It was very responsive, had a ton of features, and got great reviews (even outside the Linux enthusiast community). It failed in the market, but the reasons why it did had little to do with the choice in technology.