I've seen exactly that argument used for why Purism and Pine phones should not be able to run Android apps. But I'm sorry, as much as I would like to migrate to one of those, it's simply not going to happen if it means ending up with a phone that cannot run various important apps.

Yes, supporting apps for a competing platform gives some developers a convenient excuse to not develop for your platform specifically. But you still get the benefit of their work for the other platform. And not supporting those apps gives users a solid reason to not use your platform at all.

This has been stressing me out this week. I have had the Pinephone and Purism shopping cart tabs open for a week, and I just can't bring myself to do it.

I could maybe justify the current iteration of Pinephone as an experiment, try and make an app and buy it through my company as a freelancer, but Purism would need to have quite a few major apps before I could justify the cost. My heart wants me to support these projects. It almost feels like a moral imperative if we want to actually own and control our mobile hardware ever.

But it almost feels like going off and living in the woods to save the environment, the altenative needs a few more of the mod cons for any kind of serious adoption.

This has genuinely caused me a lot of anguish.

As a follow up, I actually changed my mind. I've ordered both, I'm going to review them and hopefully do some development for them.

I'm considering trying to drop my day job hours to 4 days so I have more freedom for side projects and this might be the nudge I needed.

Sure, but I think a more apt comparison in this context would be to Windows NT, given that Android and Fuchsia are both made by the same company: the ability to run win16 apps was crucial to its initial success. If every existing Windows 3.1 app had to be rewritten and rebuilt to work on NT at all, it would have been a much more difficult migration.

It's necessary, but not sufficient. You still need a reason for users to switch to your platform, but you remove a big reason not to.

If it hadn't been able to run DOS and Windows apps it never would have been as successful as it was, so I don't think so.

OS/2 was really only ever used in IBM shops: big enterprises that bought all their IT infrastructure, from Mainframes to network technology to printers to desktops from IBM.

OS/2 was never really successful outside of that domain.

It was also huge in the embedded space, e.g. ATMs, various kiosks, and POS terminals. I regularly encounter ATMs running some ancient version of Warp.