this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2026
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Good. Start by introducing a viable smartphone OS, because right now it’s down to Apple and Google, both from the US.
Linux is a great place to start. Android is based on Linux. Even a fork of Android that doesn’t give Google any data would be a good place to start, but relying on AOSP — Google’s open source repository — isn’t ideal.
I'd say the priority should be to have hardware that allows changing the os, just like pcs. We already have a lot of functional mobile OSes, but with locked hardware, we're still stuck with google and apple
To give a bit of technical details, the hardware must have a feature to destroy encryption keys for user data whenever a new OS is installed on it; and you have to be able to install a new OS on it at all.
Like, today, many smartphones have the problem that you can't install a new OS on them at all, because the bootloader doesn't allow it. Meanwhile PCs have a different problem, where they do allow installing new OS, but the user data is typically not encrypted and so you can just boot linux from a USB device and read all contents on the internal disk.
The best solution might be to encrypt all userdata, store the keys in the bootloader on the device, but when a new OS is loaded/installed, the bootloader doesn't give out the keys so the userdata can't be decrypted.