I don’t find it surprising. It’s a solved problem. Every phone has a music player built-in, you can even choose which one to use from hundreds of options. Offline, streaming, self-hosted cloud, the options are nearly infinite.
Even if you don’t love the lack of headphone jack in the typical phone [1], the solution is an adapter that costs less than $10. What open hardware project can compete with that?
[1] Non-audiophiles are perfectly happy with AAC/AptX codecs over Bluetooth, the bottleneck is still the quality of your headphones, IMO, and the convenience of never tangling a cable greatly outweighs missing out on the audiophile ghost whispering that they supposedly hear
Even if you don’t love the lack of headphone jack in the typical phone [1], the solution is an adapter that costs less than $10. What open hardware project can compete with that?
[1] Non-audiophiles are perfectly happy with AAC/AptX codecs over Bluetooth, the bottleneck is still the quality of your headphones, IMO, and the convenience of never tangling a cable greatly outweighs missing out on the audiophile ghost whispering that they supposedly hear