Time traveling UX designers to prevent a future catastrophe.

Probably the focus on building a whole new DE that just mimicked Gnome for the most part, that probably wasted a bit of their engineering time instead of just building on top of Gnome which was extensible already. A plugin for a DE is easier to maintain than a whole DE I would think. Anyway, that's just my small theory. I was annoyed to find out it finally died. I would of bought a Ubuntu phone if my carrier had ever offered one here in the US.

The first Ubuntu phone was not released until February 2015.

By that time, 1 billion Android devices had already been sold. The first Android phone was sold in October 2008. The iPhone was released in June 2007.

Ubuntu entered the market six years later and had to take on these two market giants, as well as other competitors like Microsoft still trying to get a seat at the table.

Drivers.