I'm cautiously hopeful (though not particularly confident) about Jolla trying again with their new phone running SailfishOS. I'm pretty tempted to pre-order one even if I know it likely won't be my daily driver.

For me, the two main blockers are camera quality, and access to banking apps. I'm in an awkward spot where I really value having as good as possible a camera on my smartphone, but I don't value camera quality so much that I'd be willing to carry around a separate device for it.

Regarding banking apps, I think this is something the EU is going to have to step in on if they want a non-America dependant phone ecosystem to grow in Europe. My vague understanding is that EU regulations basically require banks to implement 2FA where the requirements are strict enough that most banks just let Apple and Google handle it, and give zero option for alternative authentication. If the EU wants to loosen Apple and Google's hold, they're going to have to come up with a way to get citizens without Apple/Google phones to access their banks online.

Of course, the insanity here is that European governments, banks, and even the EU enforce the duopoly and thus harm themselves and European business.

Ref., e.g.:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44704645

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45742488

https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/to-buy-or-not-to-buy-that-is-...

> These up and coming phone producers can partly also be used with the standard Android OS – but note that this is developed by Google – or can be ordered with a deGoogled OS such as Volla OS, /e/OS by Murena, or SailfishOS.

This sounds confusing to me. I don't know the other two, but /e/OS is based on LineageOS which is based on AOSP, which is developed by Google. And /e/OS uses microG, which is an open source implementation of the Play Services, but it means that it sends Play requests to Play servers, I think?

In this matter, I think it's important to not do the equivalent of "greenwashing". Not saying that it is not a good idea to go with those alternatives, just saying that "those are independent from Google" is misleading.

It's very difficult to not rely on US services today, that's a fact. I think what matters is to try and support European (or non-US, depends on what you want) companies or projects. Using a European email service instead of GMail could be another idea. Or trying to use a European search engine like Qwant, etc.