Another competitor in limited marketplace, that uses Waydroid.
I don’t really see how this is better than Ubuntu Touch, and it is no way near as good as the Sailfish potential (if only that potential could be realised …).
Have you tried it? The app integration seems similar (for the use, not technical) as in Sailfish. Also I doubt this phone, as it is very new and you cannot find many reviews. It was just for interest.
I don’t think so…
I would really like to know what these ‘closed source parts’ in SFOS are, that Jolla holds back from updating the software. Is it only the app support (aka Aliendalvik)? What about selling AD / Appsupport as a different product and opensource the pure SFOS?
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I don’t mean this, I mean the conversation about Purism and so on… 
I want to add some context here from my own personal point of view, what I learned when learning how drop Google and co.
I add the disclaimer that it is my personal opinion as I work for Jolla and this is a topic close to it.
Back to the main topic:
When using any software you or someone else always pays somehow, not always with money. When you buy an Android device for example the vendor pays to ship Play Store, to be allowed to use the Android name, you at least pay part of that.
While using Android you also pay with your data no matter how much you can opt out. The whole infrastructure around Google’s services isn’t free for them to run either, they can just cross finance
a lot of these across hardware vendors, add revenue and app developers.
Similar when you stop using cloud services which you don’t pay for with money you have to pay money and/or your time to host them.
The subscription is kinda both of them except that you couldn’t buy a device for a long time where you also partially you didn’t (indirectly) pay for Android at the same time.
I wanted to write this comment as personally it wasn’t so easy to get rid and stay free of these cloud services without investing time and money yourself. Further it helps to understand how some of these things work to understand that some things seem very easy in theory but not in practice.
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I think it probably is. The device drivers are all android based. But there is no point open sourcing without a large community of developers and that takes time to build that up. It would make sense though to outsource some of the development, the product would no doubt improve. Microsoft nowadays seem to work on such a mixed open/closed model.
They also do a service for government deep-state snooping, not sure what the benefits are there, but must be considerable.