- Would the agent go through current app user flows OpenClaw style? Wildly insecure, error-prone, expensive.

- Tapping in to some sort of third party APIs/MCPs. authed, metered, documented how and by which standard to be not abused and hacked?

The unhyped truth is that LLMs are just wildly more competent autocomplete, and there is no such disruption in sight. The status quo of developers and users mostly remains.

I'd say "retro console" in the linux handheld sense is the best value hobby gadget to buy for the HN crowd.

But even if you insist on a non-AOSP way: Supporting any other, more well regarded projects and initiatives? Random top of my head idea: motivate Fairphone (Denmark) to adopt some non-android OS like Ubuntu Touch?

Absolutely not. My standard is the many other AOSP-based ROMs communities and companies that were founded around them, having success within a few years - yes, they could lean on the ecosystem compatibility and didn't produce their own hardware, but maybe that's a more viable way to start?

"shoestring budget with no volume discounts" does not explain the points of criticism above.

- company folded and changed hand multiple times, including russian ownership

- the tablet scandal leaving users with lost funds

- closed source parts

- locked bootloader

- charging a $50 device reset fee

- not much change in Sailfish OS since ages

- buggy Android compatibility and near zero native devs, all jumped ship

At this point I think they are just one of the grifters preying on naive "EU first" supporters shoveling whatever they still have in a new casing.

I'd love the idea of a greenfield EU Linux mobile OS, but I don't think it should come from this company.

> blank page dev with no open source karma (or posing as such to stay anonymous)

The problem as I wrote is not technical. I'd use a video converter or a string parser - that are offline and "download once" - gladly from any OS project. For a chat app that I'd use long term to share private communications would require trust, more contributors, and some background info - not names or an address, but some About section and a sense that the whole thing doesn't rely on the motivations of a single person and that there is some mutual/community oversight.

Putting in so much effort to chase the holy grail of a new concept of a messaging app is like a film student who wants to cram in all their ideas in life to make something epic in movie no. 1. There are some who can stroke genius on first try, but the current project doesn't strike me as such. Props for making a product that is coherent and looking useful on the surface level, but I wish you'd put efforts in something smaller in scope first (or contributing to something already existing) and gaining more of a foothold first before tackling a messaging project.

It was to be expected that a lot of corps will want to milk the term "EU sovereignty" and good willed naive people who don't look inside the packaging.

I mean it's neat, but naive at best.

> These are the same people who would lose their minds if their city government told them they could only buy food from vendors the city had approved, licensed, and taxed

But it is exactly like this in the developed world, and not many would buy food from a trunk of a roadside car.