Re: Bring in someone more Linux friendly?
"phones are more apt to be bought on a shorter time frame that PCs."
That's because the OS support is so crap.
Imagine if MS dropped support for an OS every 2 years and forced you to buy new hardware (of the same architecture, but new) to get your security patches.
If you go back twenty years, this isn't far off the mark. A new machine 20 years ago probably was significantly better in ways that end-users (not OS vendors) cared about. Since then, a bog-standard PC has been more or less good enough and the "desk-life" has risen to 5 years or more. Neither hardware nor software vendors have really adapted to that reality very well. There's been very little innovation to try to create new incentives to upgrade. We've seen GPUs turn up, but multiple processors aren't really taking over much of the compute (beyond the embarrassingly parallel parts). We've seen flash turn up and caches get bigger, but no changes to the big, flat, shared address space model.
Now look at phones. For years they've been getting better in ways than mere users can appreciate. We've played with different screen sizes and added all sorts of sensors to play with. More recently, however, the "innovation" seems to be more about protecting the vendors in a market where the incentive to upgrade is fading, just like PCs twenty years ago. We've seen the death of the removable battery, which makes phones useless after a couple of years unless you have a set of special screwdrivers and a few tubes of glue to re-assemble your device. We've also seen increasingly hostile support lifecycles, which make phones insecure after a couple of years, which is unfortunate timing given that security scares do now seem to be considered newsworthy by the mainstream media.
In response, we've seen the slow build-up of projects like CyanogenMod (and now Lineage OS), which make those old phones usable again. We now have 1.6 million active installations of Lineage and I imagine that very few of those will be going back to paying vendor prices for the latest hardware. A 2- or 3-year-old phone is basically good enough for most people and will be for the next few years. (Not for you, dear reader, but "most" of the few billion other phone users are folks like your parents or your non-geeky friends who just want something to make phone calls, send texts, and do Facebook. They are *very* undemanding.) Worse, much worse for the phone vendors, is that unlike Linux and WINE, the Lineage UI *is* stock Android and *does* actually run all your existing apps. Once you've switched, there is almost no on-going support cost, so we really could reach a critical mass of "people who already use it and are willing to help their friends get off the treadmill".
So yeah, if phone vendors want a vision of the future -- imagine how Microsoft would feel if Linux/WINE reached the point where you could just install it and forget that it wasn't Windows 7.