It's all about the apps, stupid
We all learnt, some years ago, that it is all about the apps. I was heavily involved in the Maemo, MeeGo and Sailfish communities, and I watched Blackberry, Windows Mobile and Windows Phone closely. I have even tried, and contributed to, Replicant and /e/. All of those have failed because we don't choose phones on openness, security, privacy and software architecture or even on price, size or features. We choose based on apps. Or, at least, thousands of apps are a minimum buying consideration for all users, wherever they are in the world.
I, personally, would probably still be using Sailfish as my daily driver if Jolla had not decided to only support Sony devices (I have not done any business with Sony after the rootkit). But that would have been because I am in a tiny minority of people who value openness higher than functionality and I would be willing to live without my banking app, etc.
But, around a year ago, I admitted defeat and bought an iPhone as my daily driver. I am willing to trust Apple's privacy much, much more than Google's - mainly because they use it as a competitive differentiator so have a strong incentive to keep it reasonably strong. Of course, that doesn't mean I trust it very far - I only have a small number of apps installed and I certainly don't store anything in iCloud. But it means that I can, and do, install some useful apps (like my bank's app).
And I use /e/ on some other devices I use for special purposes (DLNA media controllers, Ordnance Survey app, etc). The problem will be when apps insist on upgrades to the latest version which only works on the latest Android.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
