Look, I don’t really know if this is the right place to ask for help regarding starting up a company or something, especially when there are very complex things inside corporations, like:
Work policies
Finding the right people to hire
Designs, patents, personnel, etc… for a product
and so on… I don’t even think I’m mature (both mentally and physically) and qualified enough to start a phone company! I’m just an advanced Linux user, with a will to learn from scratch, and quite a lot of knowledge about technology in general, and that’s it!
I have a plan though, but I don’t think I can even clear off them easily:
Make my phone’s design via 3D modelling software (I think? I fear that just having paper sketches (which, I do) or drawings in Paint
Learn something like coding a custom Android ROM/porting an ARM version of a Linux distro of my choice for my device (which is not something I’d like to do much, since I’m somewhat clueless about coding in general (I was in a coding team when I was in 7-8th grade or so, but we used Pascal, and now I’ve forgotten quite a lot of knowledge from back then, and I did study front-end web dev for a while, but I gave up because the projects were too hard, and I can’t remember anything I’ve learned before)
Get some funding and help from investors (most difficult part, because I’m inexperienced and I might not be able to convince people to invest their money into my project)
Find people that’s good with things like designing, developing the OS, etc… (costs a lot of money, can be (partially) solved with funding, but I don’t have any experience with hiring people.)
Manifest my design into a patent, and submit it into a governmental office that deals with things like intellectual properties and whatnot (but I’m a minor, I can ask my parents to submit it in my steed instead, but I’m afraid they’ll force me to do something against my wishes)
Anyway, this has turned into a veryyyyy long post, so the details of my concept will be put into a comment down below this.
Open-source, customizable parts (something like Framework laptops, I think if I am able to turn the idea into reality right now, I’d make a GitHub repo, where the details of the phone chassis, display, motherboard, etc… are revealed, so people can do custom modding and whatnot)
Eye-candy OS UI (…because I’m a Linux user! I like customizing, so I’d like to make something that looks attractive, and flexible)
Enthusiast-targeted (those 2 points above will be used in order to aim at my targeted audience: people who like customizing, modding, etc…)
Dual-booting both Android and Linux (this is more of an “optional” kind of thing, I thought it’d be fun if we can dual-boot OSes on phones. I mean, if some Nokia phones can switch between Android and MeeGo, then why can’t modern phones do the same thing?)
Community helping with jobs like developing the OSes, making bug reports, etc…
There’s no right place to ask and given your ‘grand’ ideas you have to start somewhere, but I think you will not get much help here.
This is dedicated to the Fairphone and the users here are a bit overwhelmed by supporting that.
I suggest you create your own website/blog to get help/responses and just leave a link here.
More importantly this is called the Fairphone due to the use of Fairly sourced mineral and Fair wages ~ you speak nothing of that ~ and if you were to use that as the basis then best contact Fairphone officially as they understand all the hurdles you will experience.
So whereas it’s fine to post and ask I think this topic ‘shouldn’t’ really go anywhere
tbh, I thought this would be a good place to post, since I thought the tag “The Industry” means talking about the phone-making industry as a whole.
It’s late now at my region though, so I’ll talk more in detail in the future.
I can’t speak for the community here, as I am fairly new, and haven’t actively posted much. My impression, though, is that the main focus here is working through issues specific to FairPhone, from the perspective of the individual user. I could certainly imagine you finding useful information here, but other users are unlikely to be as interested in discussions about starting a business.
yeah, I am considering using that as the basis (like, at least 20% of the materials inside the phone model I’m going to create is from minerals that are mined/sourced from places that don’t abuse their workers, pay too low wages, have war criminals, etc…), but I wonder if customers will even concern themselves with things like that (most people just buy an iPhone, or a Samsung/whatever Android brand that has good phones in their opinions, etc…
yeah, I also thought that some companies might’ve already included quite a lot of stuff I wanted in their business practices, but I want to create my own take on the concept.
yeah, that’s why I thought I should aim for a more niche market, like the kind of people that’d immediately search for ways to root/unlock the bootloader of their phones, then instantly try to find custom ROMs to install, or even better, installing Linux into the phone, and hope that they’re also concerned about how most of the parts inside are made with slave labor and unfair salaries or something.
