[arcane23]

You missed my point, a simpler hardware/software phone needs less resources to maintain. No eyecandy/cushy features to maintain, security becomes easier to maintain by the community. No constantly added features and gimmicks which break and introduce weak points.

Let's not forget that all these "features" which enable corporations like Google take complete control over the project also end up driving price up, constantly. Cheap phones are a sh*t iteration of more expensive phones, instead of being simpler more basic implementations of must have features without the "quality of life" bloat on the top tier models. They should have a different tier OS rather than the same one.

I would also not make the parallel between comms devices and PCs, they're different beasts.

[gruez]

>a simpler hardware/software phone needs less resources to maintain

And a such a product is going to absolutely niche, which means no economies of scale producing or maintaining it. You try to justify that by saying it'll be maintained by "the community", but who's going to want to do unglamorous work fixing security issues, compared to developing features? Mainstream phones have dedicated security teams and freelance vulnerability researchers going after them for fame/clout. Who would want to do security research for what's essentially a glorified nokia 3310 that maybe 1000 people use?

[aspenmayer]

The Flipper Zero and its success through direct crowdfunding proves that if you build it, and this next step is equally important to the first, if you build a community around it to directly market it effectively with reversible crowdfunding, you don’t have to wait for them to then come, as they’re already here, right there with you.

[arcane23]

Ignoring how strangely against this idea you are, for no justifiable reason, it wouldn't look like a 3310, it would still look like a smart phone, probably OLED so more battery life. It would just miss a lot of modern features which are absolutely irrelevant to anyone who wants a privacy/security focused mobile phone. Probably not the latest CPU, not the latest mobile chip, but still decent for what it has to do.