In every other hardware and low-level software security project I know of, the community is trying to de-blob. u-boot, libreboot, etc. Open source firmware. Open source drivers, etc.

In phones, we still have blobs. Lots of them. And on google pixel phones, not only do we have lots of blobs we cannot see inside of in software, we also have hardware from a manufacturer that I don't trust, increasing the 'blob' risk.

The reason that there are still so many closed source blobs in the moble space is probably because the mobile space is highly competitive and a lot of innovation is occuring, and companies are protecting their IP. But consider that some company might have a product ranked #3 or #4. That IP is NGMI and they could rescue it by opening it up. We security-minded privacy-minded people don't need the absolute top performance, but we do need openness and visibility. Right now we are stuck with old terrible performance poorly documented hardware (iMX, etc, or whatever they chose for Purism Librem 5, which sucks balls).

I think this will eventually happen, and I look forward to it.