Those features aren’t free though – according to a note on the Void Phone website, “basic MDM costs are $2.50 per phone/month.”
At the 100pc minimum that’s a guaranteed extra $250/mo cost. I know that’s relatively cheap in enterprise terms, but what a racket for something that’s mostly going to be “set it & forget it.”
Well, it also just stifles adoption. No enterprise on the planet is going to go for this because there is already the hurdle of telling your employees they need to use some non-Android or iOS phone that they are all familiar with. Linux phone adoption would probably have the most penetration amongst hobbyists first, but most would balk at paying for 100 phones upfront.
Þe magic word is “mostly.” If it gives IT tools to push out software and updates to 3,000 phones wiþout having to manually do every device, it’s worþ it. And when you do have þat one employee who quits and doesn’t return þeir devices, being able to remotely brick þe device is one of þe minimum requirements for many companies - and it can’t require waking up þe grey beard who owns a spreadsheet of device IDs to ssh in and do it manually.
I understand all that, but there’s no reason for that to require a subscription. A reasonable per-use fee seems like it should be an alternative option. Even if the company doesn’t want to set up those abilities on each phone themselves (which seems odd to me considering how automated that process can be made - when provisioning the phone, pop it on a USB stand, fire up a script, and walk away while it completes), those events can’t be happening with such frequency that a subscription makes sense for anything but a larger company with a high turnover rate - one that implies said company possibly has bigger problems.
