Blloc – A Minimalist Smartphone

The comments in this thread highlight the risks of using the word "minimalist" for marketing.

Minimalism means so many things. Just looking at clocks as an example, it could be:

1. A lack of lines: https://imgur.com/JLHhp8Y

2. A lack of material: https://imgur.com/kfF2lb9

3. A lack of branding: https://imgur.com/ZkuuICZ

4. A lack of size: https://imgur.com/TLgrf5v

5. A lack of structure: https://imgur.com/LoGBK5x

6. A lack of possessions: https://imgur.com/WSuR1Hg

7: A lack of technology: https://imgur.com/KDOmoTl

...and many more. Each of these types of minimalism has a community built around it which disagree if you say something is minimalist that doesn't fit their ideology. Examples:

1. A lack of size: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21289101

2. A lack of possessions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21290867

I'd argue this phone obviously fits some definition of minimalist, though it's a bit hard to describe what's been removed (a lack of noise or visual complexity, perhaps?). But because it doesn't fit some people's definition, they get alienated and defensive.

Minimalism is obviously a highly-effective design strategy, but marketing yourself as minimalist explicitly opens you up to a lot of criticism. The criticism actually doesn't make much sense, but it's pretty hard to explain why.

Imagine if this guy: https://imgur.com/BRCJlIB had marketed the iPhone as being minimalist. The hypocrisy of a minimalist selling a consumerist object! But, the iPhone actually was minimalist in a lot of ways, just not that one.

That's the point though, the device manufacturer wouldn't have to maintain their own Android fork. They could rely on and work with the the LineageOS team to get a consistent version of AOSP on their devices and then the hardware manufacturer could just focus on making the hardware as good as they can(which is also a monumentally difficult problem, even for Google and Samsung). LineageOS is already made and kept up to date by community maintainers, adding new device support for LineageOS would be orders of magnitude cheaper and easier then developing their own Android fork.