As someone who preordered the Librem 5, I know I'm not going to get an operating system with the polish of iOS or Android. I'm willing to live with that; the phone is attractive for other reasons, both practical (easy to hack) and ideological (freedom!). Heck, even if the final product turns out so poorly that I end up never using it at all, I won't be too upset: even if my $600 didn't end up benefiting me personally, at least it went toward a serious attempt at achieving a worthy cause (an open phone).
Still, I would like to try actually using the phone as a daily driver, and for that to be viable, I'll need to be able to access the services I depend on. Luckily, I don't use that many services, and many of the ones I do use mostly have web versions; as much as I hate the experience of using webapps, I should be able to get by with them. But I can think of several that I'll have trouble accessing at all:
- 1Password
- iMessage (I guess I could try to set up the Matrix bridge.)
- Slack? Discord? (Both have desktop web versions, but not sure if they have usable mobile web versions. That said, I have bitlbee set up to connect to Discord already and I know there are bridges for Slack.)
I'm lucky that none of these seem to be hard blockers for me... but other people may not be so lucky.
And, well, if things work but are a poor experience, at some point I'll probably get fed up with it and switch back to my iPhone. Some people are more ideologically committed than I, but many are less. Though I'm not counting on it, I would love if Librem's OS gained momentum and became a sustainable ongoing project, rather than dying off as a prototype like so many prior attempts (webOS, Firefox OS, Ubuntu Touch, etc.). For that to happen, it will need users.
I will probably be using slack still from my laptop which may be unacceptable for your needs. However if Slack’s electron app runs on Linux already it may already work on the Librem 5 on release. Maybe not in fancy phone UI mode but desktop mode?
TLDR; I don’t see apps as a blocker for me personally. I’m willing to give up a certain amount of tether for privacy. I don’t expect this phone to compete with the iPhone or Android devices for market share, nor should it have to compete.
What else does the number 42 signify?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrases_from_The_Hitchhiker%27...