There are alternatives. The market is open. Maybe it’s just no so easy to come up with a “less shitty”alternative that would appeal to the mass consumer?
It's like watching the stillborn OpenPandora or GP2x, and discovering that "devices bought almost exclusively to pirate SNES/SEGA games" have no devs writing games for their market because ... well ... you know ...
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Woke: using OSS as a dev model because it's inherently more efficient/effective and leads to better software Broke: using OSS because "muh rights".
And it is, remember, an absolutely tiny group of people that actually contribute to something like Debian. What percentage of users has even filed a bug report, let alone contributed a fix? It must be well under 1%. You don't actually need that many people. All it takes is a dedicated few.
The fact that even then a 'foss phone' doesn't seem to be viable speaks volumes. It would probably only take half a dozen skilled people to get pissed off and channel their pissed-off energy into it, and that doesn't seem to have happened. Either it's way harder than it has any right to be, or it actually isn't that desirable. Revealed preferences and all that...