Re: I have an Essential Phone
"The add on bus is unique."
That might have been a problem. If the bus is unique, that means three things. 1. Nobody else can put that bus on their phone easily, assuming that the original designers license it out at all, because the bus would require lots of new hardware and software. 2. It is not easy for other companies to produce add-ons to connect to that bus because the tech behind it is unusual, so they'd probably have to implement new protocols to make use of it. Both of which lead us to 3. nobody has an incentive to support the bus, so the only place doing anything with it is the original manufacturer, which means there are no add-ons for a while and only one eventually, which means that users feel cheated by a feature that never became useful and potential customers think it's pointless to buy the product.
I can see lots of great possibilities for a hardware extension system, but one company alone can't do it. I'm unsure if it can be done, but if it can, it would require a standard freely available to device and peripheral manufacturers, so the abandonment of the concept by one won't render the idea pointless.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
