Linux is not winning on mobile in any shape or form. All mobile vendors use a highly-customized Linux kernel which has nothing to do with mainline and aside from the kernel, there's not much to write home about. So, maybe Bryan could have been a little bit more honest from the get go.
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> Linux is not winning on mobile in any shape or form. All mobile vendors use a highly-customized Linux kernel which has nothing to do with mainline
That's not a "Linux on mobile" problem; it's a "Linux on anything embedded" problem, and steps are being taken to address it. You can run a close-to-mainline kernel already on some devices, it's just not the default. And work is ongoing to also port common non-mobile Linux userland setups to mobile, so that the same stack will eventually be useful for both. A lot of non-trivial work is involved.
This will always be hamstrung by the lack of stable APIs - the issue which Google is so fed up with, they are in a process of writing their own microkernel, zircon.
You might have noticed that Android phones are supported at most for three years - that's because HW vendors refuse to maintain their drivers compatibility with lots of different kernel versions - it's expensive and takes a lot of work.
Once you have stable kernel APIs - you can write a driver once and forget about it for eternity.
Not a problem if the drivers are written to be easy to forward port. But that's not the approach that embedded BSP's generally take.
Again you offer people to work/invest more just to comply with Linux for very dubious benefits if any. This is not how businesses operate.