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Comment by niutech | Hacker News Reader

Weren't Jolla (Sailfish OS), Canonical (Ubuntu Touch), HP/LG (webOS), Mozilla (Firefox OS), Samsung (Tizen) recognized companies? Yet they failed to break the duopoly. Even Facebook failed with their phone. Who would fight with Andoid/iOS then?

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I have no answer, I'm asking the same question. Who can raise serious funds like 1 billion to do it? I'm guessing for FOSS/Linux crowd to get fully behind, it can't be a company, but a person like Linus Torvalds. Given that browsers are becoming a platform themselves for major apps, maybe it can lower the bar in the future for smaller vendors to create a feasible market.

I'm hoping that Linus "pulls a git" and suddenly announces that he got fed up with Android last week and created a new OS that solves everyone's problems.

A person can dream.

> created a new OS that solves everyone's problems.

Created a hobby OS, just a hobby, won't be big

Even Linus wouldn't be enough. If anybody could, it would be China and its conglomerates like Huawei, Xiaomi, Alibaba, Tencent.

All of those ran really slow compared to Android versions at the time, or their dev tooling sucked. The only one I really enjoyed using was Sailfish, and even they had to implement an APK compatibility layer. So for the average consumer, what’s the benefit to using that over straight Android?

Privacy.

Okay, so how would you market that to someone that's non tech savvy? What's the sales pitch?

They are all impressive tech, but not actual stuff you can sell or distribute until you can answer those questions.

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