[43920]

> I am 100% sure you, as a manufacturer, could develop a very lightweight shim over a linux or BSD kernel that has significantly better performance than Android does

I’m not sure why this would be true, unless you’re willing to cut back significantly on features. Google already spends quite a bit of effort on performance improvements, and most manufacturers aren’t exactly known for being able to produce high-quality software.

There have been a couple projects that have tried to make phones based on pure Linux (Librem, Pinephone). Their performance is limited a lot by not having good CPU options, but it doesn’t seem like they’ve been able to achieve much performance improvement on the software side either.

[jpc0]

> I’m not sure why this would be true, unless you’re willing to cut back significantly on features.

Sorry for not making it clear but I was implying exactly that. There are a ton of features that are really nice but a person spending that little on a phone probably doesn't need. I would likely even put "big touchscreen" on that list...

  Really a phone that:
  - makes phonecalls
  - has support for WhatsApp/Telegram etc even without video calls
  - has a real keyboard
  - has my banking app
  - commits to long term support and repair(5+ years preferably 10)

Would be number one on my list of things to buy because thats exactly what I want. I would absolutely still own an iPhone that I use day to day. But that cheap phone is exactly what I want when the iPhone needs to sit in a drawer for two weeks and I'm using a burner number out of town.

[hulitu]

> Google already spends quite a bit of effort on performance improvements

They spend a lot, yes, but the results are in "useless features improvements".