Phones are such incredibly personal devices. This should be what your phone is but economics has made phones untrustworthy because of their complexity.
So I've always wondered why we haven't seen more projects like this.
In my opinion, they should drop the hardware keyboard in favor of a d-pad or a few Yes/No type buttons and an onscreen keyboard. If the hardware is to be trusted this shouldn't matter to the trust calculus. And the market has proved the blackberry segment is niche.
Whatever you do with data security, messaging and so on, you're using a device that knows where you are at all times. With perhaps centimeter accuracy, using GPS and triangulation from WiFi access points. And all that prevents that from being shared is some software settings. On a device where you're not even root.
Would any of the Linux-capable phones run VirtualBox, with a few VMs?
Is anyone working on a phone that might run Qubes?
My guess is that there isn’t a very big addressable market for privacy, and hardware requires a lot of up-front investment. It has to be someone who believes that the world will be better if it exists, not simply the highest $/hour ROI on building it.
There is more money in surveillance, as we’ve seen, than privacy.
Oh, but people care about privacy.
Just not enough, to pay significantly more money for it and suffer performance loss.
But this is also because a mobile is a black box for them, and it would give them a big headache to try and understand that site about that phone. In the end, for them, they still have to trust the developers, so they stick with the ones they know by the corporations.
So I've always wondered why we haven't seen more projects like this.
In my opinion, they should drop the hardware keyboard in favor of a d-pad or a few Yes/No type buttons and an onscreen keyboard. If the hardware is to be trusted this shouldn't matter to the trust calculus. And the market has proved the blackberry segment is niche.