Perhaps differentiated with ACTUAL VARIETY of hardware. Phones with physical keyboards… phones with e-paper…

Both exist and are still sold, though. Take the F(x) phone, or the Boox Palma. The problem is that there’s not enough demand for such phones to make that many of them, which in turn drives up the price.

It DOES fail directly installed from the APK

Sorry to hear that, that’s very strange. Reverse engineering APKs isn’t that hard, maybe you can find a community that can propose a fix for you if you post the crash logs?

Linux thrives because it runs on ANYTHING

Linux thrives because companies like Intel, AMD, and all the other manufacturers submit patches and drivers. Back in the day, the hardware came out first, and Linux ran on backwards compatibility modes and drivers written by volunteers. Nvidia has only recently opened up their driver (sort of), and if try to run a game or even any other kind of GPU accelerated application under Nouveau, you’ll know that “Linux runs on anything” only applies to things that someone made drivers for.

Smartphone manufacturers are greedily wanting to ENFORCE that environment to be Google’s specific flavor of Android modified the way THEY want

Samsung and other manufacturers are shipping their own browsers, their own stores, their own calendars, exactly because they don’t want to be held by Google’s grasp.

What you seem to want is the Windows Phone model, which had a lot less trouble doing updates back in the day: Microsoft provided the OS, companies provided the hardware it ran on. Of course Microsoft’s version was closed source and had tons of other issues (like breaking compatibility every major release), but the OS design followed this path.

Manufacturers hated it. They wanted their custom branding on the phone, but Microsoft wouldn’t let them. Carriers hated iOS for the same reason, because before they could slap their themes and crapware on phones, but Apple wouldn’t let them either. The only reasons these companies ever sold any phones was that the carriers and manufacturers were smaller than Microsoft and Apple’s influence, and that Apple controlled their own production line.

In a perfect world, I agree with you. I want Android to just apt-upgrade my phone from Android 13 to Android 14. I know its’ technically possible because Ubuntu does it. In practice, this idea relies on thousands of volunteers working together with hundreds of manufacturers who all contribute code and effort into the ecosystem. Linux may be free for the end user, but it certainly isn’t free for the companies putting hundreds of man hours into drivers they’ll never see any profits on.

If you manage to find a world where your ideals work out, please take me with you. It sounds amazing. Sadly, I think the current world is moving away from the computer freedom that started in the 80’s and died in the mid-2000’s.