It seems extremely hard to achieve that though. Creating a new smartphone hardware is very difficult and expensive. Creating a new smartphone OS and ecosystem is probably even harder. In order to have a proper "libre" smartphone you'd need to basically do both things. If behemoths like Microsoft couldn't pull it off I'm not sure how a newcomer could.
I suppose the best path would be to create a new phone that could either boot Android or your privacy-respecting OS, this way you could still get the mainstream sales with Android and you'd target the niche users who value their privacy with your custom system. Still seems very difficult to achieve, if you want your phone to be cheap you need to target a high sale volume to dilute the cost of your R&D.
I think the big problem is that smartphones never really had an healthy open source ecosystem going because it was all about closed hardware and locked bootloaders. Without a decent open source stack available it's hard to bootstrap a new system. And even if you did manage to do it you'd still need to convince people to port their apps to it (because not having Whatsapp or Instagram is going to be a deal breaker for many).
If you want an example of how many people it takes to create a cellphone, Google bought HTCs Pixel phone team, which amounted to around 4000 people. This likely includes all the software engineers that do driver work as well, but it worth noting the size.
You can get away with smaller teams if you take the full package that Qualcomm gives (they do most or all of driver work for you). You saw what Essential Products was able to create with around 120 people, but they were heavily using work from other companies to launch it.
Doesn't fit the bill yet. It's not cheap enough (you can get an iPhone 8 for the same price) and it remain to be seen if it'll manage to generate a viable ecosystem of apps around its platform. We also can't judge of the quality of the finished product yet.
I genuinely hope they succeed but that's clearly not the "Honda or Kia" of smartphones the parent was talking about, at least not in this iteration.
I suppose the best path would be to create a new phone that could either boot Android or your privacy-respecting OS, this way you could still get the mainstream sales with Android and you'd target the niche users who value their privacy with your custom system. Still seems very difficult to achieve, if you want your phone to be cheap you need to target a high sale volume to dilute the cost of your R&D.
I think the big problem is that smartphones never really had an healthy open source ecosystem going because it was all about closed hardware and locked bootloaders. Without a decent open source stack available it's hard to bootstrap a new system. And even if you did manage to do it you'd still need to convince people to port their apps to it (because not having Whatsapp or Instagram is going to be a deal breaker for many).