Today 10 years ago I went to Poland to buy a Phone with pre installed #Firefox OS on. The Phone was a Alcatel One, so very shitty. Two years later I installed Firefox OS on my Nexus 5 instead.
It was a very good concept, but sadly rolled out on too shitty hardware so it never caught on.
Same, having competitors to Android and iOS would be great.
The are some alternatives out there. Calling them competitive might be a stretch though.
I had a Windows Phone (NOT the older Windows Mobile) for a while back around 2011 thanks to my job as a multi-platform mobile developer. I loved that phone and the OS and developing apps for it was a lot easier and faster than for Android or iOS. I was surprised at how quickly Microsoft kicked the whole thing to the curb.
Nokia Lumia 700 in bright blue was stunning! I really liked it, the tiles were different and it felt funky. Pity they abandoned the project.
BlackBerry OS 10 was my favourite one. They way it used widgets and gestures was really cool. Hub application was awesome. Android and iOS copied a lot of it later but I liked how simple and minimalistic BBOS10 was compared to them. Never tried developing for it though.
Developing for BB was a complete nightmare. Despite the fact that you write in Java, the app still had to be compiled and deployed onto a device for testing out any code changes (the emulators were worthless) and the compiled app had to be digitally signed - by servers that were often/usually down, so sometimes you'd change literally one line of code and then have to wait 45 minutes to test it. Or sometimes you'd just give up and go home.
And the standard app components were shit. The only time I enjoyed coding for BB was when I wrote a TV guide type of app using the basic Java graphics classes and drawing everything on the screen with my own code. I was actually extremely surprised by how powerful and flexible BB processors were. You'd never have any idea of that from using the standard apps.
I never liked the touch stuff for BB, though, and they were in their death throes when that stuff came out anyway (the worst was that model where you pressed in the entire screen to click). For me the old track wheel was absolutely brilliant since it allowed extremely precise control over the cursor. And hey, they had 16-bit color!
But that was the old OS, right? Not the BB 10? I'm talking about phones like Q10, they were completely different from the old phones with cursors.
The phones were different but the development process was the same.
Had a BB10 Z10, loved that phone! It was a but sluggish to be sure but I was gutted when they pulled the plug.
There's a Linux phone, but I've heard it is a beautiful mess.
We have GNU/Linux on smartphones now. There is PinePhone and Librem 5. Some Android phones can run GNU/Linux too.