I just realized how powerless we are. The situation is almost unavoidable. Majority people will just accept this. They are unaware how restricted they are, thus they don't care.
so do we have enough engineers who care about maintaining useful tools that aren't handicapped or compromised to be able to support this endeavor? i think we do. there have to be many good eggs within these companies who die a little inside each time something like this goes through.
Only because those alternative mobile OSes were, frankly, crappy in comparison to iOS and Android.
I don't recall Google or Apple doing anything particularly anticompetitive to cause any of those OSes to fail to keep up in the market, aside from just plain "being the 800lb gorillas in the room". (Not saying they never do anything anticompetitive, just that those particular market failures can't be laid at their feet.)
It would be great to have some really good alternatives to the mobile duopoly. Hell, if we had more fragmentation in the market, that would even lead to more impetus for interoperability and common standards—which we desperately need more of everywhere in tech these days. But those three, in particular? They lost because they were worse at being a good mobile OS for most people.
They're being sold and enough people are buying them to keep these companies alive. Fairphone said they're not delivering to USA because they don't have the manpower, not because there's no demand. Every release again you see people asking in the comments when/if it'll finally be available to them
That's not to say it's a big market where you get big economy of scale benefits. The devices are expensive but they're yours (and some of them try to do ethical resource mining and/or pay fair wages as well). Some of these will also have Googled variants available, but it's a choice
or they don't have the manpower to take care of...