This makes me wonder: why can we have a top of the line desktop PC which is totally libre, but not a smartphone? What has gone wrong?
IBM took on the personal computer market and made the PC standard, which launched the chain of backwards compatibility that continues to this day. Because they did this in 1981, the idea of "secure bootloaders" was not on their radar. By the time anyone started thinking along those lines, the standard was well entrenched; this same standard gave Linux and other free OSs a relatively static target to hit, just as the internet was gaining ground (a force multiplier for hippie free-software types). Before PC clones took off, every home computer was a different design, OSs were specific to each model, and open alternate OSs were not really a "thing".
For a glimpse of an alternate history where these things happened in a slightly different order, take a look at TI graphing calculators; each is a bespoke microcomputer using very 80s-ish technology (z80/m68k cpus, built-in BASIC etc) and each has RSA signed OS images, the keys for which were only factored in 2009. Even now that every single microscopic detail of the hardware is known, and the keys available, alternative OSs are niche and usually incomplete projects confined to a single model, because there is no standard to target.
All we have now is a reversion to the natural order of things, permitted by the shift to "mobile" breaking all the rules and allowing all the norms to be reset.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/even-...
Android is pretty much as close as you're getting - I'd say it's quite comparable to the situation on desktop PCs today if not a little better because the open source community around it is quite potent. In fact, OnePlus is quite popular in these communities for making cheap, well-spec'd phones with unlocked bootloaders where you're free to have full control over your device.
And all this is missing one of the biggest sources of this spying - apps. Most apps send pretty much everything they can get their hands on when you start them, I launched a game the other day and had it connecting to 6 services for 2 analytics, ads, and crash reporting, all of which were contacted every time the app was started. For this I'm very grateful for tools like XPrivacy and LineageOS's privacy guard which all you to trivially block this and such tools are not commonly available on other platforms.
Of course, with phones it is more difficult to assemble stuff (everything is much smaller), but the whole concept of a standardized open platform is not there.
Somebody should define the "PC Phone", and declare it an open standard.
The platforms are well known, architectures are standardize, GPU drivers are often proprietary similar to the desktop world, but ultimately I can flash anything I want on my phone, I've run stock Android, several modified variants, Firefox OS, Ubuntu, Sailfish and others.
From a software perspective that's all not too hard to achieve, the hardware side of things does lack standardization but that's because as you say, it's not exactly something you can hand assemble.
But yeah, totally accessible.
"totally libre PC"? All major CPU manufacturers implement hardware level backdoor we can't disable. The newest version of the most popular OS tracks your every step by default. All of these tiny chips in pretty much any modern electronic device are full of binary blobs you have no way to inspect. Maybe we live in different worlds then.
Phones are closed, locked down, and bugged by design.
This was the era of flip phones when carriers had full control. They really didn't want to lose that control. I doubt a company smaller and less influential than Apple could possibly have gotten a full-fledge computer of any kind onto cell networks.
This led the entire mobile ecosystem down a path where the device is locked down by design even though today carriers are less able to influence that.
Add to that the emergence of surveillance-driven advertising as a way to monetize "free." It's very hard to compete with free (or subsidized) products. Most people compare price vs feature set, not privacy or security. So there was a huge economic incentive to turn phones into little surveillance devices to siphon up data to be used to drive advertising.
Without surveillance capitalism most apps would cost money and phones would probably cost a lot more.
In Europe, Nokia did it in 1996, 11 years before Apple's iPhone.
Wat? It was easy to install third-party jars on my Nokia S60 devices, both before and after the iPhone, no carrier approval required.
They met their $1.5 million funding goal and had some backers pitching in at 20k a pop which implies rich people / company interest
It was an accident of history, leading to the ISA bus x86 clones, and Compaq not losing a court case around clean-room engineering.
IBM even tried to roll back that accident with the MCA bus, and possibly would have succeeded if they hadn't been so greedy.
But since you end up with essentially the same OS with essentially the same userspace doing essentially the same thing it raises questions of why go through the effort and hassle. You're completely free to do so, though.
You will, however, still end up with binary black box device drivers. Just like you do on a top of the line desktop if you want to actually fully use the hardware.
Now Librem 5 from Purism got fully funded (1), so in a year you'll have a fully free phone.
The market for a fully free phone is there but it's small(ish). Hopefully they'll get a piece of the pie with their anti-walled-garden mission statement.
Locked or hardtoflash bootloaders.
Not releasing code. Even encrypting stock ROMs.
Punishing power users by blocking root.
Consumers not caring.