But smartphone is a computer, personal computer with telephony hardware. And Android is Linux with different userspace, mainline Linux can boot quite a lot of smartphones. Terminology is so wrong.
There is a general purpose computer under there but most people don't interact with it like that. The fact that it can does not mean that it will.
A lot of this has to do with the ecosystem and how a device is presented and what the UX is like. Manufacturers increasingly want to lock things down and hide them away.
> There is a general purpose computer under there but most people don't interact with it like that.
The same could be said about 90% of laptops and desktops purchased for home use. How many people actually use "computers" for tasks they couldn't do on a phone or tablet if those devices had larger screens and keyboard support.
That's been true since 1984 (and whenever Windows caught up ;) ). The enthusiast/hobbyist sector has long been a small minority of the computer buying public.
Windows wasn't really that bad until recently. Sure, it didn't go out of its way to give you tools to command your computer, but it didn't get in the way either.
The true dumbification of computers started with smartphones. iOS and Android are the primary drivers of this change, of treating computers as appliances. Microsoft unfortunately embraced this trend in recent years, they quite openly say Windows is an OS-as-a-Service now[0]. Still leaves plenty of control points to exploit[1], but it starts getting in the way.
