> Why would this project be more effective at doing this than iOS or Android?
This is an excellent question. The basic answer is that the incentive structures are different. Apple’s platforms are primarily designed to efficiently deliver commercial software. The app-store, the apis and everything else about their OS ecosystem is designed around the idea that packaged Apps, immutable to the user and remotely maintained by a commercial developer, are the answer to solving end-user problems using computers. They implement this model better than anyone else, but it’s not the only model.
Two other models are GNU Linux and it’s open source ecosystem, and the Smalltalk model as exemplified by pharo. In both of these models, the user isn’t just a consumer of Apps or the system, but is an active participant in creating it.
I’m not suggesting that either of these are the solution as they stand. I’m just pointing out that the iOS / Apple model is not the only possibility. You are right that just competing with it directly would fail. Even Android is failing at that.
> I don’t see why people other than ideological technologists would want to use this phone.
This is perjorative sounding, but a reasonable concern. If the answer was ‘people would use smalltalk instead of buying apps’, or ‘with Linux people can build whatever phone they like’, then I’d agree with you.
Of course we need something that end-users can plausibly use without being a technologist.
My argument is that we can actually build such a thing, and that it can be much better as a ‘bicycle for the mind’ than iOS.
> Many companies have tried before - Microsoft, Amazon, Canonical, and failed.
This is to be expected. A company trying to compete with Apple on their terms, even if they have the resources of Microsoft, is going to fail.
The answer will be a low-end disruption - something that is good enough, but also capable of things that iOS is not because of the commercial model. It won’t come from one company trying to take on Apple directly.