Viable alternatives were long gone. I really miss the days of Symbian and Meego, phones that are hackable yet intuitive to use (I.e. Nokia N900, N9).
Realistically now we have Tizen and Jolla OS, which had backings from Samsung but nobody gave two damn about it.
I bet even if any of these vanilla mobile OS gets big enough they’ll get bought by the 3 giants and suffocated to death just like how Microsoft sniped Nokia.
Not the parent commenter, but for me - Samsung are just as morally vacuous as Google, but are way less competent, at least on there software side (their component manufacture seems to be world class in at least some areas).
They'll happily do evil shit, and execute it poorly. Samsung are _way_ more likely to leak the unnecessarily and possibly illegally collected personal data they hoover up than Google are.
Realistically now we have Tizen and Jolla OS, which had backings from Samsung but nobody gave two damn about it.
I bet even if any of these vanilla mobile OS gets big enough they’ll get bought by the 3 giants and suffocated to death just like how Microsoft sniped Nokia.