This is probably gonna come as a shock to some people, but I wholly think I could live with a Linux smartphone today. I really only use my phone for two things: text/calling and staying connected to my desktop/laptop. As long as it supports the KDE/GDE connect protocol (I doubt it doesn't), I could see myself actually being one of the early adopters here.
KDEConnect is supported in KDE/Plasma-based distros. Work is in progress to add it to Gnome/Phosh. KDEConnect is definitely a killer app!
Can't speak for the other distros, but Mobian/Phosh has reached a point where it's usable as a primary phone. Tons of work from the community has brought battery lifetimes up from ~1 hour to the point where it lasts me the day under normal use. Firefox is usable, and most every piece of software I need has a workable counterpart.
That said, the experience is still quirky (think c.a. 2000 linux on desktops). Most things work, but the final mile still requires a decent amount of poking at config files and trawling wikis. Doable, but not everyone's cup of tea.
GNOME has gsconnect. It talks with KDE connect apps using their protocol. I've been using it for years until a couple of months ago, when it started to eat into CPU and make all my desktop lag. There is an open issue for that. I'll check if new releases fixed the issue. My devices can still talk between themselves.
GSConnect (which I already use) is written as a GNOME shell extension in order to provide support for clipboard sharing. Unfortunately, none of the mobile-friendly shells/desktop managers support GNOME extensions (yet). There's an effort to port GSConnect to Phosh-based environments (https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/phosh/-/issues/514), but that's still exploratory. It's also possible to install KDEConnect on Mobian, but it doesn't work fully and the UI isn't quite mobile-friendly yet.
I would be totally fine using such a phone for almost everything I do. The only big gap would be using Sweden's identification app BankID and the money transferring app Swish. Unless these were ported to the phone, I would unfortunately lose one of it's most important functionalities for me.
Of course I could just have an Apple/Android phone sitting at home for such purposes, but it is definitely less convenient.
This is one of the things I worry about - a duopoly not just backed by two wealthy and shady megacorps but also effectively by law as it mandates a mobile app for some things yet the app only exists for iOS and Android & no public API is available.
Several of the “challenger” / “FinTech” banks in the UK (e.g. Monzo, Starling) require the use of their app. They offer limited read-only views via web, but only offer all features via app. No iOS / Android phone? Go to a different bank.
Mobile banking apps will probably be the hardest challenge in the long term. In my cases, for social media and communication, it's easy. I don't use whatsapp and facebook messengers on Android, and for Telegram there is a native client that works well enough (and Tok[1]), for Matrix I wrote NeoChat[2], for mastodon, I'm writing Tokodon[3], there is also some activity around a QML Signal client and implementing other open protocols is doable.
But for banking there is absolutely nothing and bank in the EU requires a mobile phone app to unlock the account. I fear that the only way to solve that is at a political level but this probably also means something unreachable for now. This sucks.
Same for banking apps here in Italy and the OTP generator of our id system.
Plus some apps I don't strictly have to use but I want to: WhatsApp (to use the web app I should run the android one somewhere it can receive messages with my phone number, cough), Telegram (probably OK), OSMAnd, NewPipe as a YouTube adless replacement (YouTube web is not OK), Google Street View and satellite maps (the web app is vastly worse), car sharing apps (less of that now), random apps from my customers.
All considered I'll have to carry an Android phone anyway so I'm carrying only an Android phone. No Linux phone. But I've been using Ubuntu as my only OS since 2009.
While I'm not entirely sure on the specifics, this is where Anbox can hopefully create a workable Android runtime layer. While it would be a bit overly optimistic to assume that "secure" authentication type apps would work, it could help with adoption for people like me who are missing that one vitally important app required to make the PinePhone a daily driver.
Unfortunately, Anbox isn’t a longterm solution for non-libre Android apps. The problem is that more and more Android apps require passing SafetyNet. It started with banking apps, then spread to games, and Google may one day simply encourage every app to require it. Even Android ROMs stripped of Google services like LineageOS are finding it a challenge to pass SafetyNet, let alone Anbox.
I'm not convinced. I'd love a Linux phone but there must be some standard that ensures apps are easy to develop and the apps must grow significantly for this to catch on. Otherwise it'll be just like Linux on the desktop. It'll become a mess of 15 different standards and apps devs will not bother with that.
There are many standards on linux, but in my experience they are mostly inter-compatable. I have KDE/X11 programs running just fine in my GNOME/Wayland environment. I also have alsa, pulseaudio and pipewire playing nice on my laptop.
I've heard binary distribution is a problem, with many overcomplicated methods like Appimage, Snap, and Flatpack. But it doesn't matter because linux users will prefer installing from source code or a trusted repository anyways. And they should: This is the more secure way of doing things. Closed source programs need not apply.
Some can be operated via the web but they tend to require a hardware authentication token, which is as inconvenient as carrying a second phone (each bank requires a different token or card reader).
Some can be operated via the web but use their phone app as an authentication token for web access.
And some don't provide full functionality via the web at all.
Plus, the apps are way more convenient than logging in via the web in practice.
I can't speak to your spending habits, but if a bank exclusively operates on a single-platform native app, I'd consider that a dealbreaker for if I want to use it or not.
When you need credit, you take what you can get and if your rating is poor there isn't a choice of providers. Sometimes that's exclusively mobile.
I opened a business account with an (at the time) exclusively mobile bank last year, because other banks took too long to authorize setup (they generally take weeks or even months), and I had a new company starting. I went with the only bank I knew where I could get set up within a few days to start taking revenue, as I had a client ready to pay from the start. It turns out that being mobile also meant they had a streamlined electronic setup process, and no visit to a branch during a pandemic. It still took a few days, as various people checked out my identity, read my LinkedIn profile to confirm what kind of business I was in, etc.
Last time I opened an account for a new company it took over a month and two in-person interviews, so the mobile bank was a big improvement.
Since then they have added web access as well, which is great, but use the phone as an authentication token, which is a bit annoying. It's not ideal, but neither are any other options I know about. Having to carry a separate physical token/reader around (or in practice, leave it at home and not have it when needed), as all the other business banks I've used require, is more annoying.
This is about like saying that Javascript will never catch on unless there is a single Framework that all developers use to create applications....
Not only is that unnecessary, it is also not practical as the entire purpose of Open Source is that if you do not like something you fork it and make it your own.
Linux on the Phone should absolutely avoid the Wall Garden draconian approach of iPhone and modern Android
