You'd think they could, but they had Windows Phone, and that flopped. Not saying that Ubuntu Phone couldn't do better, but unless they got devices in carrier's stores, they wouldn't have a chance.
I've always installed Ubuntu from an ISO, never pre-packaged on a PC.
Similarly, any business model can't rely on handset sales. Apple and Samsung sell them by the millions and we're talking a few hundred here.
Community ROMS such as Lineage OS supporting (per wikipedia) 165 devices suggest that there is grass-roots support for tinkering. Devise a foolproof method for device support on any handset (Halium) and solve the app gap by containerizing Android (Anbox) and the users may follow - but on their own hardware, NOT a custom device.
UBports lives on by the community, for the community - in spite of Canonical abandoning the platform.
That's fine for a tiny community, but Canonical is a business, and they need to sell devices in decent volume. That means getting them into US Carrier stores. I'm glad you guys are able to continue using, but as long as the path was to flash a custom rom, they were never going to hit mainstream.
> Canonical is a business, and they need to sell devices in decent volume
I'm saying that approach was never going to work, when even an established vendor like RIM couldn't chisel out a market with their revolutionary BB10 OS.
I think the biggest reason Window Phone flopped is actually the same as ubuntu and firefox, they were trying too hard be different. Ubuntu had it's scopes thing, MS had their tiles, Firefox had their adaptive search.
I think if they'd focused on being better than android, faster and more developer friendly, then they would have had a lot more luck.
