More to the point. Making a cheap phone is not an affordable endeavour.

Linux phone makers such as pine have discovered this in the past. As your first products are going to be low demand. Running a business on the profit margins of lower priced phones becomes hard. It seriously limits your ability to gain investments. Making competition with similar priced products insanely complex.

it's not.

I'm not blaming Fairphone nor Murena. the economy everywhere is not helping make things cheaper.

it doesn't change the truth that right now, privacy is for the rich.

Fairphone doesn't have any bloatware either (besides base google apps), yet their phones aren't priced 1k+

yeah, no doubt, it's not being subsidized.

low income privacy supporters don't want it subsidized either.

at the same time, they are in fact excluded from this model of phone.

in the universe of possibilities, it's possible to have an affordable phone with privacy intact that serves more communities, at some time in the past or future.

but not from murena, not right now.

tl;dr no duh.

I want it so bad but I live in the U.S where these types of phones are forbidden by our corporate/police state.

so true