Mobile phones just use normal NAND or eMMC memory, there is nothing special about it. Difference is that they often have parts on the drives that the system marked as removed but aren't actually erased yet. Some forensic kits make use of this to recover removed data
Also most phones are encrypted, but for this it doesn't matter if the cartridge is encrypted. The final goal is to copy it, not to modify it.
I know my fair share of mobile forensics and chip off since this part of my line of work (no not for .gov). What I wanted to say was, that dumping a soldered NAND chip was way more difficult a few years ago than it is now - with plug-and-play solutions all over the place. Right now dumping a flash chip is basically as easy as extracting a SATA-HDD and creating a physical copy - as long as you have the right tools readily available.
So if I was a developer I would assume that my NAND contents would be dumped on day1 if not day0. So this can't be a valid thing my strategy keeping my device secure.
To just go back to smartphones: Chip-Off was primarily used to circumvent PIN or Patternlocks on unencrypted devices. Devices that use strong passwords with state of the art encryption - you'll just find "random" data on the NAND (maybe except the phone-os-partition and sometimes the emulated SD-Card)
My reply was also not about the flash card but on EpicLPer's statement about the switch NAND being dumped and having partiton names in it. Again good security comes not from hiding anything but making it nearly impossible to break it even when you exactly know how it works.
The hardest part is developingng like a GUI, because for this you would need to be able to run unsigned code. The Switch doesn't just accept any kind of code on the cartridge (Most likely), it would need to be signed by Nintendo.
Copying cartridges has always been done in just months, making a flash cart that noobs can use is the part that takes the longest
I also now my fair share about code signing and modern security architectures. So GUIs like we had on GBA or DS flash carts won't be available any time soon (I guess). Having a cart that would just behave like a sky3ds would sell like hell. So if it could be done it will be done. The main goal of those carts is piracy - and getting unsigned / self signed code running on the system to display your own GUIs - at this point the switch would be hacked wide open so carts would be obsolete again.
My guess is that even providing a 1:1 copy of a flash cart is more difficult then getting some kind of code execution on the switch itself.
Another guess will be that the communication between the cart and the switch will be encrypted as well.
Was there really a 1:1 copy of a 3ds game just months after the release? I always thought the first team that accomplished this was sky3ds. The other carts like Gateway relied on firmware bugs / exploits...
However, keep up your good and contributing work - I'm very curious what your findings will be!
bye,
Darky