The German startup ecosystem is off to a strong start in 2026: Between January and June, 3,053 new startups were founded. This represents a 52 percent increase compared to the second half of 2025 and means more startups were founded than in all of 2024.
GrapheneOS is leading Android custom rom, but it isn’t a startup and doesn’t support much hardware.
The others are LineageOS based and have weak points when it comes to security, privacy, and frequency updates.
All Android custom roms are still directly tied to Google’s software development (AOSP).
Sailfish OS (Jolla) is Linux based, but is proprietary, so not really an open platform.
So seems like Jolla is the only company really developing an independent mobile OS.
So? You think someone is going to fund a startup and develop a fully independent, fully open source phone OS that will support modern hardware and all the apps stock Android does? Of course not. Jolla, Graphene OS and LineageOS show what a small company can currently do. You also have Ubuntu and Postmarket OS, Fairphone, Murena and couple more. Between them they cover all the niche markets: security, privacy, open-source, Android alternative and independent hardware. No one is investing heavily in them because those markets are really small. New startup trying to develop something from scratch makes no sense.