OQB: @weirdo_from_space@sh.itjust.works
Six years ago the entire Linux enthusiast space was super excited for the PinePhone, then everything fell apart. What went wrong? Was PINE64’s favoritism towards Manjaro the sole issue or were there other problems?
Software. It’s a phone that can’t make phone calls, with a camera that can’t take pictures. It doesn’t matter if some coding genius manages to port Crysis to it, if the phone can’t phone, it’s DOA.
I recommend this blog post to get a small piece of the picture : https://blog.brixit.nl/why-i-left-pine64/
Side note : in my opinion the pinephone was always a developer platform and could have succeeded with it’s low specs. It failed because of pine64 lack of collaboration with the community that were building the software.
Everyone will claim it is the hardware, but we can see from cheap phones that a majority of people actually get outside of the US that it doesn’t matter as much.
It was never a complete phone after 5 years. It never had the software to actually use it as a daily driver. Calling still “doesn’t work all the time” according to users and similar with texting. If your phone literally can’t be trusted to make a simple call and receive a text out of the box, then it won’t be bought to be used as a normal phone. That’s as simple as it gets.
It has just been relegated to being a fun side experimental phone for enthusiasts, but you can’t have a company-carrying product like that because the consumer base is too small to fund the software development.
They also specifically say
While in the future the PinePhone Pro will be able to serve as your daily-driver smartphone, at present the PinePhone Pro should be considered a development platform.
On the store, which further discourages consumers.
Building a smartphone OS and all the features needed is an extremely expensive task, so it is completely understandable that it has gone at a snails pace.
Because Linux on phone isn’t ready. Phone makers only support Android and only project that use Android kernel are anywhere near usable. Mainstream Linux still need work. PinePhone offers a good, cheap platform to keep working on it and progress is being made. Time will tell if we will ever get there. Mobile is 10x worse than Windows was back in the day. A lot of things are tied to Google so closely it will be impossible to replace (Android Auto for example).
@weirdo_from_space@sh.itjust.works
I’d bet it was the hardware specs, that’s what it was for me, I took one look at the specs and immediately moved on. Clearly, others were thinking the same.
I can deal with immature buggy software, software can always be freely updated. But subpar, underspecced hardware can only be fixed with buying more or different hardware
No linux phone will succeed for as long as they keep making them with shit specs
