Ok, now this makes sense to me! I don't think anybody's going to beat Apple/Google on their playing field. So, play on a different field. A Sailfish-like effort tailored to a specific consumer base might not have the economic power to support all the bells and whistles that Sailfish was trying to provide, but it might provide a basis upon which to build.

Jolla had a chicken-and-egg issue here -- without a large base of users, they couldn't maintain the level of OS quality that they were aiming for. But without hardware to run on, there was no way to create a large base of users. Something targeted instead towards a small base of users (at least to start with) might be able to overcome the hurdles that Jolla ran into...