I mean, if someone said, "I've successfully ported Vim to Android!", my first thought would be, "Why in god's name would I want to run vim on my phone?"*
* Ruling out, of course, someone plugging their phone into external KVM.
Something that has always bothered me is that smartphones are basically supercomputers nowadays, at least compared to what we had in the 90's, but I feel incredibly limited in what I can actually do with my iPhone. I can't easily code stuff for the iPhone in Haskell, I can't open up multiple "tabs" of videos on the YouTube app, and even a lot of the apps that do get ported over end up having incredibly limited "mobile optimized" versions.
I would absolutely love a phone that could let me run the "real" versions of apps when I need to. Ubuntu Touch was trying this, and I honestly don't think I'm unique in this desire.
That's because they're intended to work as media consumption devices rather than productivity ones. If someone feels productive on a phone, he or she has very likely adapted herself to the device than the other way around.
I had to struggle yesterday with my GF new phone because her lawyer sent her a paper in .doc format using Whatsapp (no kidding[1]) and she had no capable reader. Fine, I thought, let's fire up the app store and find one. Now I just have a couple old tablets I keep at home 24/7 and don't use smartphones at all: no feature in the world can convince me an € 5000 smart phone can be more usable than my €20 dumb one plus my € 400 used Thinkpad, so I'm not exposed to the level of annoyances the usual phone user experiences every day. Back to ther phone, I knew the google app store wasn't that wonderful land where you tap the equivalent of apt-get install name-of-a-free-as-in-unicorns-and-fairies-doc-redaer and it magically installs, but man... I didn't expect that level of crap! I tried a couple "free" reader apps and every attempt to run them had either popups appearing asking to click to buy something, or more subtle ones where the click to buy button was a lot bigger and dangerously close to the window really small X (close) button. In the end I installed f-droid, dns-66 and libreoffice reader, but what if she had to do all for herself and could only find those pieces of crapware?
[1] apparently that practice is widespread among non IT professionals, and I find it rather dangerous. The privacy implications should raise some big alerts.
"I would absolutely love a phone that could let me run the "real" versions of apps when I need to. "
That's my dream as well. Give us an open (hardware) phone and OS plus apps will follow. Manufacturers however would hate this because the phone (tablet, etc.) as a platform allowed them to undo what Open Source achieved in the last decades on personal computers: now they have again a piece of hardware they can fully control; the software is closed and incredibly dumb, and it forces you to connect to online services to do anything. We're sort of back to mainframes, that's like killing over 40 years of IT development!. Also by keeping some parts of the firmware (mainly drivers) closed they can ensure no FOSS hippy is going to ruin their dominance. If there was a way to install a working native mainline Linux image (no chroots/VMs/frankendroids etc.) with full hardware support all those phone left in a drawer collecting dust could magically become useable again, with some important side effects. For starters, I'd dare to say every 10 of them at least three new phones would remain unsold, then it would become a lot harder to put spyware into user phones, and third, what would happen when even a few thousand users in the world started showing their colleagues, friends and families that their old phone isn't just faster than new ones but also safer and cheaper, shows no ads, doesn't steal personal data, doesn't require constant updates (==cheaper data plans) and supports the same software they could have installed on their PCs. Definitely, phone (and their OS) makers would hate that.
It was a bit overly ambitious (maybe), but I actually think that it's not an inherently bad idea.
EDIT: Also, don't want to be "that guy", but doesn't Google Drive support .doc files? In that particular case I wouldn't think it's terribly hard.
That's a great idea to me. There are too few choices on the cheap side to consider, like the Pinebook. Even the GPD Pocket 2, which I find gorgeous, is still too pricey IMO. A smaller Pinebook without trackpad would probably be our dream pocket device.
"but doesn't Google Drive support .doc files?"
Probably yes, though I'm used to always look for offline solutions: Once I get the data on my device, backups aside, it stays there for processing until I have to send it elsewhere. The concept of applications as services and cloud computing is ancient and totally unwanted to me, probably because dumbed down terminals connected to a do-it-all central server is something those of us who are over 50 see for what it really was: a huge limitation of the past, rather than a technological advancement. Forcing users to get online to load or edit something is just a way to control access both to the data and the code to treat that data.
Personal ideas aside, my GF family she often visits lives in a poorly covered area and being forced to depend on connectivity for editing a document or any other thing easily doable the traditional way, would be problematic to her. Luckily the world isn't made exclusively of hyperconnected cities with tall buildings.