A single manufacturer convinced a lot of them to work with Apple phones.

It's definitely doable, but the product has to be appealing to users, which also seems doable as phones already peaked in capability and making a good phone now is more about polish in build + software than being technologically ahead of the competition.

I consider my 2yo mid-range phone a great phone, and with today's politics owning my phone is in the top-3 things I'd like my next phone to improve on, not a better camera, screen, battery, slimmer build nor gimmicky stuff (ok, maybe an IR to replace remotes or LoRa support would be kind of cool)

> Open phones are all fine and well, but good luck convincing banking and government applications to work on those (especially in countries where bank login is used to access government services).

First phones, then lobbying. As citizens of an open society, government exists to serve us, not the other way around. With enough users, they will have to respond. As I said, there are a number of areas that need attention and a coordinated effort across the breadth of society to restore, maintain and improve the foundations of an open society.

Carry an old used iPhone, powered off with no SIM, and treat it as a black box hardware token that you turn on only for these uses. You can tether it via wifi through your “real” freedom phone.

there is a power that could help with this. And I know quite a few people do not like this. But this would be prime EU real estate.

convince people to use them and banks can suck it up

In my country, government applications are required to be interoperable, use open APIs and work with open formats (XML, PDF, etc.). There should be no problem there. I've already used some FOSS applications to interact with government services.

Banks are required to interoperate using open API in the EU. EU managed to cripple this requirement, by not requiring open api access to regular customers, but only to accredited organizations. There's more work to be done on this front.

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