leave a gap in the smartphone market wide enough to drive a truck through

I think the opportunity is most likely going to be taken Huawei's HarmonyOS than something like Lineage or Librem.

As such we should consider this almost a-kin to a DeepSeek level threat to international security. Google did a lot to secure our phones [0], and we were lucky their economic incentive forced them to be as open as they were.

[0] https://www.privacyguides.org/en/os/android-overview/#google...