Well it depends. Personally I was a flip phone user until my last one finally kicked the bucket and the Canadian telecom monopoly presented me the choice of purchasing a new "network compatible" flip phone for 250$ and paying 25/mo or getting a leased to own phone on a 40/mo plan.
I need a phone - I got a smart phone because it was the only sane fiscal decision... and when I got that phone I was presented with the options of iOS or locked down Android.
This may just be a Canadian thing but I think it's important to not present this as a completely free choice. If you're on a budget and you need a phone to occasionally communicate with the outside world you're going to be forced into getting a smart phone - the only choice is Android vs. iOS.
The market for flip phones isn't primarily the elderly or other people who want/need simplified interfaces. This means they're usually very low volume and have much less price competition. That, and most flip phones are just running android with a highly customized skin, which ups software development costs
When I bought my first iPhone it was the first product that I paid a large chunk of my savings for and which I really hated in several ways, but I needed in other ways. It's a necessary evil.
There are alternatives. The market is open. Maybe it’s just no so easy to come up with a “less shitty”alternative that would appeal to the mass consumer?
If you want to be able to use a long list of apps that many people consider essential, you're stuck using iOS or Android. Sure, you can sometimes make do with the mobile website, but usually the experience is pretty terrible. For some things, like contactless payment, there's just no alternative, on a mobile device, at least.
The reality is that nobody wants the alternative. Another commenter was replying to you pitching a mobile debian version, and went on to explain that said mobile debian version isn't usable ... and that's probably because the size of the community of people actually interested in it is so vanishingly tiny that they can't sustain development.
It's like watching the stillborn OpenPandora or GP2x, and discovering that "devices bought almost exclusively to pirate SNES/SEGA games" have no devs writing games for their market because ... well ... you know ...
———
Woke: using OSS as a dev model because it's inherently more efficient/effective and leads to better software
Broke: using OSS because "muh rights".
I don't think there's any inherent reason that Mobile Debian couldn't be as popular as a proportion of phones as Debian is as a proportion of desktops. Debian itself is niche. Linux use represents what, like 1% of all desktops? Yet even with the effort spread thinly over dozens of distros it's still excellent.
And it is, remember, an absolutely tiny group of people that actually contribute to something like Debian. What percentage of users has even filed a bug report, let alone contributed a fix? It must be well under 1%. You don't actually need that many people. All it takes is a dedicated few.
The fact that even then a 'foss phone' doesn't seem to be viable speaks volumes. It would probably only take half a dozen skilled people to get pissed off and channel their pissed-off energy into it, and that doesn't seem to have happened. Either it's way harder than it has any right to be, or it actually isn't that desirable. Revealed preferences and all that...
The original premise of an iPhone was that closed experience. It was an improvement over the mobile market that existed back then. I remember because I had my fair share of Philips, Alcatel, Nokia, and ipaqs. What I’m afraid of is that some actions and reactions of a—let’s be honest—insignificant number of power users who want to root their phone is going to break the experience for the majority of the regular users. Progress is welcomed but let’s not forget: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
The original iPhone had no App Store and thus no way to get third-party native apps at all. I don't know that the original premise is at all relevant now.
Kids who like games often do know about the Apple App store stance on emulation - they find out immediately when their Android using friends have access to a massive library of emulation easily that they don't. I've never owned an Android anything, and this annoys me on long flights where I'd love to just stock up on some old emulated games to pass the time without having to pack another device.
