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.
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2025
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It didn't fail, really. A bunch of distros managed to port themselves which AFAIK, this hasn't seen the success rate that the PinePhone managed to achieve. You were even able to flash a really old version of Android on it and it well... booted.
Granted, yes, even though you could put OpenSuse, Gentoo, and Fedora on the PinePhone, that alone didn't make them very usable. Fair enough.
PostmarketOS, Mobian, and Manjaro had dedicated their work to the PinePhone to get it a better experience. It got to the point where folks were actually trying to use it as a daily driver. The major obstacles with PinePhone and any of its iterations is the same culprit that probably made it very difficult for Ubports, FirefoxOS et. al to get to a point where it could actually be used as a daily driver.
IMO, the proprietary stuff keeps getting in the way of folks seeing progress with using it as daily drivers. The only other real thing for me that the PinePhone lacked is a good battery. Just a lousy battery. Hardware. Imagine, they figure out how to put a good battery in one and everything else would pretty much work half the time.
The benefit we all have at this point in time is that this did not end up like UBPorts or FirefoxOS because now the entire community can take advantage from what came out of this initiative. Mobile Gnome wasn't a thing before. It is now and Purism guys have been contributing upstream last I checked. Same with Mobian guys. We didn't have Plasma Mobile before. Now we do.
Maybe I'm just in the "glass half full" camp this time but I don't see this as a loss.
@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
A combination. The hardware was woefully out of date before it launched. But for every one of us that would tolerate buggy software to tinker with it. There are thousands that can't or won't. Thousands NEEDED to support a project like this.
Mobile/touch interfaces under general *nix right now are 10 to 15 years behind. KDE touch is good generally. I hear decent things about GNOME too. But not to the point of early android or iOS. It will get there but there's still a lot of pain ahead.
What I'd really like beyond the software to make use of it. Is a small compact interface for network and interaction. That you could just drop and swap compute modules in. A CM5 is still underpowered. But if it was just a drop in replacement. Where you could change out the SOC or use the SOC in a new interface package i'd be set.
The Liberux NEXX seems promising - if it will make it to production
Regarding the software, the entire operating system will be open source, and all LiberuxOS developments will be published. The installed software will also be open source.
This is what makes me distrustful. Will? Just publish what you have. Start open, not "eventually open". What if they decide "nah, we actually don't want to opensource it"? Then that money donated towards an opensource phone is down the drain or just into some grifter's pockets.
Yea, it's got a good foundation and their campaign intro statement basically nails the hardware issue observed from past attempts, they just gotta make it to shelves lol
Fuck I hope they make it to production LMAO
There was pinephone pro. I had one but lost it when I moved across the country. I loved it but unfortunately it wasn’t something that I could rely on because of a lack of proper deep sleep. Legit only had like 4 hours screenoff per charge and the lack of a usable camera was a bit of a bummer. I haven’t tried it in a few years now. I miss it despite its complete lack of practicality.
I would bet real money you nailed þe cause. Obsolescence in smart phones is already bad; few reasonable people are going to pay full price for a product which is obsolete even before it hit gets into þeir hands. Especially since we all know Linux is still evolving in þe mobile space and may not be well optimized for the device. I know I'm expecting early Linux mobile distibutions to lag Android in performance. It's just bad on bad.
I remember seeing news about it, reading the specs, and immediately losing interest.
2GB RAM with 32GB of slow eMMC storage, Wifi 4 (2.4ghz only too), Bluetooth 4.0, not great 5MP camera, and a 720×1440 IPS screen were fine in 2010, but this is a device released in 2020.
The software aspect also turned me off, reading about so many things that were in progress or 'sort of working'.
reading about so many things that were in progress or ‘sort of working’.
I don't think that's specifically a Linux phone issue as much as developing for mobile devices. This is kind of thing I've always seen with custom ROMs.
For example, my old Moto G5s Plus is running PixelExperience 11 (now discontinued), and it is mostly working, except for secondary camera and encryption. There's often things that don't quite work in these cases.
For me it was that and the fact that it was more a "developer phone" and not a. "User friendly phone"
Those are almost exactly my phone's specs >.<
At least it was really cheap, which the pinephone wasn't
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.
And on top of that, since it's a hobbyist phone, buying one is hard (because of limited stock) and expensive (because of imports)
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.
For me it was the slow hardware combined with the lack of support. I thought we would at least get finished drivers with the device. But stuff was slow and broken. They relied on the community too much to get the hardware working.
Like others, it was specs for me. I fully am ready to deal with minimal Linux applications designed for a small touchscreen display but for that compromised mobile experience, I want a good desktop experience when it's docked. So I'd like near flagship phone specs. So today would be like Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 or better. Canonical had the right idea with Unity 8 but didn't execute
Now today there are mobile Linux frontends but no company pushing out hardware to leverage a Linux phones most unique ability, docked experience with full desktop applications. Things like the Ayn Odin 2/3 or Ayaneo Pocket S. They're putting out niche Android gaming handheld with high end mobile SoCs that I doubt sell a ton while in the Linux phone land, it's lackluster
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).
specs was crazy. i got one in hope of replacing my iPhone and it was barely useful.