Consumers will go where the apps are: if developers increasingly exit the Apple and Google ecosystems, which seem beset with nearly daily anti-developer actions, the only other option is Linux app development for mobile. The hardware is ready, cheap, and good enough.

"Average consumers" are becoming increasingly technically sophisticated as demographics shift, and of course the two leading mobile OSs are already Unix-based. While they're not marketed as "*nix" to end users, they absolutely were marketed as such to developers.