Agreed — but from the point of view of a private person, it doesn’t much matter what epithet you need to prefix the word “problem”, it still remains a problem.

From the point of view of a potential phone manufacturer, it also means that whatever you do and no matter how great your product is, very, very few people are ever going to use it at all unless they can use it in whatever they need to do; and that means you will probably fail as a manufacturer.

NFC and battery life are absolutely huge concerns. Cell tower stuff isn’t great either but if you absolutely had to many of us can live without cellular and just do VOIP.

Apps aren’t that big an issue, waydroid is a thing and the appification of the internet is detrimental anyway. Do it in a browser.

For myself I don't consider NFC payments or the few apps that require device integrity auth. Not everyone falls into this category but a good percentage are. We need more modern open hardware. To the larger software point there is a lot of good Foss software out there even for phones. What we need is a open software center like a flathub that makes them easy to find and deploy.

The problem is that most people are passive consumers now, but it's slowly changing. Many of my friends who used to be regular normies having absolutely zero interest in technologies have recently switched to linux or FOSS apps and are now thamsalves FOSS enthusiasts. Heck, even my 80 year old grandma uses DeltaChat now.

Including voicemail, and RCS? Wow I need to check out this ecosystem again, thats exciting!

Ok, you go and tell all the companies to stop using apps.

My car charger? Controlled with an app.

Location of car chargers? In an app.

My bike GPS? Controlled with an app.

My gym entry? An app.

Climbing wall? An app.

You tell all those companies to stop using apps and add control panels to everything, go back to paper maps and RFID entry cards. I'm sure they will do it if you explain to them that there are dozens of users that don't want to register with Google. Dozens!

Most of us don't need apps, but they're extremely convenient.

The point is separating convenience from profit-obsessed CEOs and surveillance-crazy governments.

Nobody needs mobile phones, we had a world without them, we can do it again...

https://docs.waydro.id/usage/install-and-run-android-applications

You may want to install F-Droid to get applications graphically. Or use the Play Store if you installed a GAPPS image.

Still depends on Play Store.

https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_Tab_A_8.0_2015_(samsung-gt58)

i pulled it out of the ewaste bin ♻