Prospects for an accessible and open version of Android?

[Linux for blind general discussion]

While I agree price is an issue(even at it's minimal specs, the
Meerkat is about 5.5 times the price of a 4GB Pi 4 with case and all
the needed accessories to power the Pi from a wall socket, and all you
really get for that extra money is a SSD for holding the OS, a second
4GB of Ram and the greater flexibility of running an x86 distro), but
I don't really get the size argument. The 10cm cube engraved with a
1cm grid I keep around for making rough measurements won't fit in my
pocket, but a plastic container I have that, comparing it to the cube
is at least 4.5 inches wide, 5 inches long, and two inches thick fits
no problem and the Meerkat is only 4.5*4.5*1.5 inches if I remember
correctly. Hell, I'm pretty sure the Meerkat is smaller than a
Nintendo DS classic and Playstation Vita combined, and if I were to
pull those out of my box of old hardware, I have no doubt both could
fit in the same pocket.

Now, admittedly, maybe I'm just lucky to have decently sized pockets
and normal pockets really are as tiny as implied, but I don't hold my
Pi 3 in my hand and think"I wish this thing was smaller), and while
the only Smartphone I own is a dinosaur from the Android 2.x days,
whenever I think about trying to repurpose the old thing, if anything,
I wish it was big enough that the keys and key spacing on it's
built-in keyboard where on par with a TI-83 graphing calculator and
that it had a full-sized SD slot and everytime I hold someone else
smartphone, I tend to think along the lines of "would it kill them to
add enough bulk to fit a higher capacity battery, physical keyboard,
full-sized SD slot or any of the other things that have been
sacrificed in the name of miniaturization as a terminal goal?

That said, it'd be great if planned obsolescence didn't render phones
borderline unusable by the time the average person has paid one off
and if Android wasn't stuck in proprietary driver hell that prevents
all but the most popular models from ever getting aftermarket support.