@bradenslen And I should clarify: I'm happy E Foundation is considering this work around. My beef is why does most of the world only have the choice between two production smartphone operating systems? Something is horribly out of balance here.
@bradenslen Ask Microsoft. They had been in the smartphone business for longer than probably anyone and were putting out well-receieved phones, but then they abruptly quit…? (In retrospect, perhaps that should have been our first warning they were going to get out of the browser rendering engine business, too…?)
@smokey A year or two ago I went to buy a MS phone and discovered Microsoft had/was abandoning the phone effort. I guess this was because it was another Balmer "me too" project, and not part of the new strategic vision mapped out by the new CEO. Still I wish they had stayed in the hunt. Prior to that I had a Blackberry phone running BB10 which was quite a good OS but the hardware was slow. Before that I had an HP webOS phone (the one they never released) which I bought unlocked on eBay. webOS was wonderful, the best phone OS I've ever used, but the physical keyboard and my big fingers didn't get along, plus, unsupported, one by one the few apps available, left over from the Palm years, quit working so I had to give it up. I've had iPhones off and on since day one.
Now I'm feeling trapped: I have no landline and I need something reliable for business and family emergencies. Do I want to rely on untried technology of the Librem 5 linux phone or the E Foundation de-Googled Android phone and be a Beta tester or go with something tried and true like an iPhone again? (And admitedly the iPhone would give me Apple Pay which is a bonus. But then we have Apple's proprietory SIM which means I can't just switch my main phone number to another GSM phone by changing the card, which is a negative.)
So here I sit, venting my frustrasions, trying to map a way forward. Thanks for listening.
@jemostrom Well I just looked it up and it appears Apple uses a standard nano SIM card. I guess I was remembering when Apple switched to nano SIMs before the rest of the phone industry. Thanks for calling the question, because if iPhone uses a standard nano SIM card it would make it easier to own an iPhone plus experiment with a spare phone that uses an alternative OS.
@bradenslen It’s sad to think that a decade or so ago we had some iteration of Windows-for-phones (was it still CE, or Phone), iOS, Android, BlackBerry’s OS, and webOS (if not more—not sure if Symbian counts) available for smartphones, and now we’re effectively down to just iOS and Android :-(
@smokey Well, for me it's decided, I ordered an iPhone XR last night which will get me off the Google Android spyware hook for the time being plus give me Apple pay. At some point I'll get a Librem 5 or flash my Essential Phone to E Foundations OS and add a seperate line for it so I can test it and see if I can adapt. The iPhone will let me test the MB iOS apps like the carriage trade. :-)
I think there is a niche out there for small companies to introduce alternative phone OS's. Big companies, like HP with webOS, can't do it because they need mass scale. This is a niche market. But we now have retail distributon channels like Amazon and eBay which can support a niche.
The problem remains Google. On top of Google's contractual restrictions about selling forked Android, most OSM's fear retrobution by Google if they start producing non-Android phones along with Android phones. As it stands now, the EU will probably get a niche phone OS long before the US.
LG uses their brand of webOS for their smartTV's and I wonder if it could be adapted to phones? Samsung and Huawei both claim to have alternative OS's in the skunk works that they maintain just in case Google gets too demanding.
