Hi!
Compared to iOS/Android, we want to get rid of walled garden / rent seeking practices. This means that by design, the ecosystem should not require things like “apps vetted by a store operator”. That also means exploring different monetization approaches, to incentive both app devs, hardware manufacturers and OS vendors.
Compared to classic mobile linux distros: we believe that they are not attractive enough from a user and developer standpoint. On the other hand, the web has many developers and we want to leverage that. I don’t want to start a shouting match with the “regular linux” crowd: this is a niche that has a lot merits, products like the Librem 5 pushing for more open HW are very much needed. But we think that focusing on mobile gnome/plasma for the UI is not the best choice for the application stack.
The web is a naturally permission-less execution environment, so it’s very well suited to be both dynamic in terms of content and code access, and at the same time it’s an unrivaled platform to enhance user experience by directly learning from the user’s activity - all locally, in a private way.
We mostly inherit the capabilities of the web runtime here, except for usability I guess (not sure what you mean by that). Security is a chain, and there is a lot to do on the distro side to be on par with eg. what is standard on Android (secure boot, read-only system partitions, a/b updates etc.). I know this is contentious for some people here, but it’s meaningless to pretend shipping something that is not really secure, but yet saying it offers privacy.
We will have custom Mobian images “soon” (thanks to the Mobian folks who reached out to explain us what to do!). For now you need to manually download an install the debian package on top of an existing Mobian installation.
The current version is very much a work in progress: you can configure wi-fi and a few other settings, and play around the UI. There is no telephony support yet. It’s not ready yet for daily use 