I had one device who died after a couple of weeks: suddenly it refused to switch on. So I found the real source of pain from Pinephone project: the assistance. I sent a detailed report about the hardware failure and they sent me a message about how properly recharge the phone , something like : "you need the power supply, insert the plug in the 220V socket, insert the USB-c cable, etc", demonstrating that they didn't read my message at all. After some further rounds of nonsense instructions, that , anyway, I followed giving them feedback about the results, I asked for a replacement. At that point, they started to waste time, another department apparently stepped in. After my complaints, they asked me to send the device back without acknowledgment of receipt, via ordinary post service, in the USA (I'm in Europe and I received the phone from Asia), sending to an anonymous p.o. box. I told them that it was unacceptable because in that way I took all the shipment risks not having any proof that I sent the device nor that the parcel in case of problems. Luckily, I found a post service with proof of shipment, so I had at least a receipt proving I sent the device back. At the end, they refused to send me a replacement, starting to negotiate the amount of the refund, because they wasted so many time I risked to not be able to ask Paypal intervention, I asked Paypal to step in receiving a full refund.
On the initial response, in case it's the Pro that can be explained by a known hardware issue that manifests as an apparently bricked device if the battery gets drained and regardless of charger it takes several hours to bring it back to life[0].
Even so, that does not excuse the rest of the story and hopefully they can improve. A friend of mine also had some frustration with communicating with their customer service (which appeared outsourced or incompetent).
Hi, I'm am a pro. I have laboratory equipment and I did the needed checks before opening the RMA. As explained to the service the problem was elsewhere. It's exactly the opposite, IMHO, they treat me as an idiot consumer that wasn't able to recharge a phone. I think they don't realize that this kind of device often is purchased by people different from the average consumer, so yes, I had same impression of your friend. Moreover, I tried to access their on-line form to request the RMA: the only browser at time able to access and send properly the request was Opera. I tested, Safari, Firefox, Chromium: only Opera was able to do the job.
Your story sounds bad, but I would bear in mind, that they are not professionals for handling consumer cases.
They are mainly linux smartphone hackers. If I would buy a device, I would consider it a donation if something goes wrong and not expect something to be able to work with. But that part should probably be made clearer. I also cannot say they are fully to blame, I found their website clear enough that there is no real quality control or support. But if I would have believed certain internet enthusiasts, I would be sad because of broken promises regarding stability. At least basic working functionality by now would have been nice.
Still, things are maybe getting there.
"It's incredible... how much the PinePhone experience improved in the meantime"
I'm an hacker and I gave up with that platform after that experience because if you can't guarantee reasonable assistance quality , a basic replacement service if the device is defective and a procedure for RMAs in reasonable times, I feel is better to employ my time elsewhere. Two months asking a replacement and obtaining nothing, two months : we aren't talking about a service from hacker to hackers as it should be.
> I would consider it a donation
I'm also donating my time, for that reason I don't feel their behavior is justifiable.
> a lack of notifications, something I as a "my phone is in silent mode, no it does not even vibrate, I mean it when I say silent"
> when I dropped my PinePhones I was lucky enough to not break them, I am not affected by a failing WiFi/BT chip (an issue not too uncommon by my anecdata)
> I remember attempting to bring the factory image up-to-date around the date devices shipped and ending up with it in a state where at least the GUI wouldn't come up after all
> writing an update in gedit, running Firefox with ~20 tabs for hours would have been plainly impossible without multiple reboots and likely some unfortunate data loss in the meantime
If this blog post is trying to convince me never to get a PinePhone, it's doing an excellent job.
Author here. The blog post is not meant as a discouragement, but as a report. It does not help anyone if people get a PinePhone (or other Linux Phone) with the expectation that it's just going to work like their big-platform-high-volume smartphone, and then cry a river because mobile Linux is not as refined.
Maybe I should have highlighted the personal success stories I have had more (contributing to mobile-config-firefox, evaluating tons of apps, creating issues and seeing them getting fixed) - but I really don't like bragging.
Still, the "Conclusions" section isn't that encouraging either:
> My hardware has held up well, [...], I am not affected by a failing WiFi/BT chip (an issue not too uncommon by my anecdata). [...]
> I know, some people will wonder if they should buy a PinePhone after reading this, and I can't really answer this question for you. Read up on PINE64's return policy, maybe; check whether your current phone network is compatible and decide whether you could live with the available applications. Watch some videos and decide if you can live with the time Firefox takes to launch and a lack of notifications. Make sure to have the willingness and time to tinker, to get the deeper "Linux knowledge" necessary if you don't have it, to make whatever distribution you start with your own [...]"
...so, to sum up, if you want a nerdy toy to tinker with, get a PinePhone. If you want something that works "out of the box", go look somewhere else.
The more I interact with both Android and iOS - the less I want to live in that world. I'm tired of products changing underneath me because
"our metrics indicate that [insert ui change here] creates a 1.7% increase in user conversion from unpaid to paid seats"
or
"our metrics indicate that [feature] is heavily used by our most active paying customers, but most new subscribers don't use it at all - we need to push [feature] in their face so they become very active paying customers like the current users of [feature]!"
or
"Do you want to hear about all our products? I know you paid for no ads, but we're not showing you an ad - just a promotion that lets you know that there's a new product that we've just released. Also - Did I mention that our partners have also released a new product that we'll be promoting to you in just a moment! Isn't that great! Also - these aren't ads."
And it's EVERYWHERE in those ecosystems, even in the companies that aren't blatantly disregarding your privacy for their own profit by just directly selling your data wholesale to the highest bidder.
So at least for me, I really REALLY want something open source and usable in the phone sized device space.
---
All that said - I have a pinephone, and it isn't there yet for me. But it's tantalizingly close.
Well, I on the other hand was convinced, that I want one, as soon as it is stable and out of alpha.
I am just getting sceptical, if that ever will happen. I know that I am also not helping for it to happen, but sorry, I had my share of weird linux driver issues.
I get notifications on mine just fine, even with suspend.
Dino generates notifications when I get messages, mutt rings the terminal bell when I get email (if I cared I could pretty easily have it generate a toast notification too.) If you treat the thing like a desktop rather than a phone then most of the software will "just work" occasionally needing a small amount of glue to deal with things like the suspend/wake cycle to save battery life while still allowing for notifications etc.
The Pinephone is very much the "just install gentoo" of phones. Most people who actually use it are going to have radically different configurations and experiences.
It is indeed great at putting off tons of end users. I have no idea why anyone would expect anything beyond useable for a Linux Phone if these mountains of issues are being revealed to the end user.
Five to seven hours of idle battery life is basically competing with the Steam Deck on who empties the battery quicker. This is before I have mentioned the ghost town of apps that you can't show to anyone if one asks: 'Does it have Instagram?'
Another reason why this device was dead before it has even arrived.
Author here. I'm sorry for being blunt, but good grief, comments like yours make me want to stop blogging!
You did not read the full paragraph nor the paragraph after the one you quoted, right? (If you took the time and read them, I really should stop.)
Also, yes, there's no Instagram client I know of (and thus none is listed on https://linuxphoneapps.org), but Facebook properties and a privacy-adjacent, nerdy developer crowd somehow don't go well together.
I have been using a Pinephone as my daily driver for the better part of two years.
Here is my wishlist for hardware changes to the Pinephone:
1. Fix the emmc so that it runs fast. There is a known issue with the emmc that it runs at half its max speed. It can be trivially fixed in hardware (and Pine64 even recommends a solder based hardware mod) but Pine64 keeps selling phones with slow EMMC. This would solve some (though not all) of the perceived slowness of the Pinephone.
2. Usable hardware kill switches. You will notice that the article doesn't even mention the hardware switches for the camera/microphone/WiFi/BT/cellular. This is because the switches are A) under the back cover and B) too small to flip with a finger (requiring a toothpick or similar). Purism got this right by making the switches usable.
3. Add a "diffusor" to the LED notification light so that it is more visible from all angles and doesn't make an obvious spot on the ceiling in a dark room.
The software bugs are numerous and I would not yet recommend a Pinphone to anybody who doesn't enjoy using the command-line on a phone.
Also, Pine64 for years has listed replacement battery in their store but they have listed it as Out of Stock. As batteries are the part of a phone that must be replaced every couple of years and because it can be dangerous to use batteries of ill repute, Pine64 should actually sell replacement batteries.
Regarding 2.: I asked about that for the PinePhone Pro, and I was told that changing the case is super expensive, as it requires new molds. From what I've heard elsewhere, PINE64 reused another companies case design (and molds) for the PinePhone, and that (duh, it was just some regular phone design) did not have kill switches.
Regarding replacement batteries: There are some brands that make okay/fine replacement batteries, I am quite happy with the one I've written about in another comment on here. But yes: They should be available in a perfect world, but given current global supply chain problems, it's understandable that they are not at all times.
Unfortunately shipping li-ion batteries is not easy as well. IIRC, this is actually one explicit reason Pine64 is making an EU store, so it is easier to ship things like li-ion batteries to folks.
My wife recently bought me a Pinephone Pro as a present. I liked the idea, but in practice I still haven't managed to use it because I'm stuck with basic problems.
E.g., the battery wouldn't charge in the phone. I bought an external charger, and this seems fine, but ideally I'd like a backup battery so that I can charge one while I use the other. But pine64 batteries have been out of stock for ages.
Their wiki says "The supplied battery is meant to be compatible with Samsung part number EB-BJ700BBC / BBE / CBE from the 2015 J7 phone": I bought the CBE one, but it's such a tight fit that I'm terrified of using it in case it explodes or something. I have no idea where to get a proper pine battery from. And the forums are not exactly flooding with activity when I asked my question (https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=16851)
Beyond that, a lot of the stuff that is supposed to work on Pinephone, turns out doesn't work in the Pinephone Pro. In particular, the multiboot sd-card demo (https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=11347&pid=77027#...), which I was really keen to try, because I found the 'stock' distribution that came with the phone pretty ugly and useless (to my needs, anyway). I had the Jolla phone in the past, and I was very happy with it, so I may try to install Sailfish when I get the time to figure out 'if' it's possible, and if so how ...
But for now the pinephone pro is just sitting there, waiting for a compatible battery to show up, and me to find the energy to experiment with a compatible OS, before I'm even going to use the phone for anything even remotely productive. I'm gutted.
the pinephone pro is definitely still thoroughly in the bringing up phase. for people just wanting to play around with it/actively use it, and not intending to develop it, the regular PP is the better option. They do make this pretty clear on their store page for it, to their credit.
> That said, the accessories seem to be plagued by hardware bugs
I received the Pinephone Keyboard a little more than a week ago. Ordered it because I thought it would revive my motivation to use the Pinephone, because it would turn it into a cool mini linux laptop.
However, since receiving it, I wasn't able to get it working. According to the community the pins don't always make a connection to the phone and you have to shim it, while risking to break something. The keyboard charges the phone and all the required drivers are installed, but typing just wont work.
Overall I still really like the idea of the Pinephone. But since receiving it in 2020 and recently receiving the keyboard I had to spend 90% of the time using it for debugging, fixing, reinstalling OS after breaking upgrades etc. and am now at a point where I just don't care about this device anymore. Because during the 10% when I can actually use it, it is just way to slow.
I of course knew what I was getting into and know that it's still in a dev phase.
My favourite OS to use is DanctNIX with SXMO, btw.
I bought a PinePhone along with the keyboard case to muck around on as well.
Initially, I got no response from the keyboard so I started reading up about it. The first think I found is that when you've got the phone attached to the keyboard, you mustn't use the phone socket for charging as it can fry the electronics (something about the charger chip in the keyboard, I believe) - only use the keyboard socket for charging when connected.
Then, after worrying about whether I'd fried a brand new device, I discovered that after a software update, the keyboard suddenly started working. However, the top row of keys weren't working well and required a stern press for them to activate, so I hit the forums again looking for a solution. Some people were making shims for the top row of keys, but then I found a post going into detail as to why the keys had trouble activating. Apparently, the rubber doesn't have enough room to squish down, so an easy solution (if you have a dremel) is to remove the top row keycaps and remove a mm of material from the top edge of each keys (the side nearest the hinge). Took me about ten minutes and now they work perfectly.
Still haven't found a good use case for it though as the screen is short and wide so not great for terminal hacking.
I had this problem, it would charge and detect the keyboard was there (on screen keyboard wouldn't appear, but keyboard didn't input anything), It was down to the clip around the pins not being clipped in, so it was effectively pushing the case away from the pins. I had to give it quite a squeeze for it to pop in.
Although to be honest, after using mine for a month I gave up for various reasons such as upgrades breaking things.
I have to say that I never found a use case for it.
I remember that I hated the OS it came with. I think it was some flavor of Ubuntu that did not let you install software in any normal way. If I remember correctly, I did not even manage to get vim running.
After some reading up on mobile Linux distros, I switched to Mobian, which I generally liked.
But then I noticed that the phone wakes up and turns on the screen at random intervals. And quite often. Never found a solution to fix this. The web is full of reports about it:
I watched the development around it for a while and contributed some details about the issue. Checked back every few weeks and did not see any progress. Then forgot about the phone at some point.
I have a Pine64 board from an ancient Kickstarter. Some parts of it like video decoding have never worked. There was at one point something vaguely in the shape of a driver that was supposed to support it appeared in an undocumented zip file but I never managed to get it to work. Requests for specs so the community could write their own driver fell on deaf ears. I decided never to buy another Pine product again, and I have not regretted that decision.
Free Software needs time. This is a first step and a good one. Much progress is already visible. It will get better over time, because nearly every programmer knows deep inside that a really free phone is really needed. Every personal effort to help bring it to work makes perfect sense. Insofar this is an incredible important device and works.
Can you use whatsapp on a pinephone? I know there's web whatsapp but you need to sign into that with a native app.
Honestly the browser, google maps (which works in the browser), whatsapp, SMS, phone calls, alarm, stop watch, camera... that's really about all I use on a phone. If I can find a linux device to switch that does that, I'll switch in a heartbeat. Phones are the least pleasant part of my "digital life" because of their toy operating systems.
Maybe look in to sailfish os. It has android app support and so far (almost 3 years) whatsapp has worked for me without issues. Don't know about google maps, haven't tried it but I did install microg and got my bank app to work on it.
The phone runs Linux, and on Linux you can run Anbox/Waydroid to run Android apps. I don't know how well WhatsApp works on Anbox, but theoretically it should be possible.
From what I've read online the SoC is quite slow compared to most modern smart phones so your mileage may vary. Sadly, the mobile phone market is as closed down as ever, making it very challenging to get any kind of open source system to get calls or texts. There's a reason they shoved an external chip in there!
If you want an open, somewhat limited but usable smartphone experience, check out Sailfish. They've been in the mobile phone market for years and their original base in Android makes the OS compatible with quite a few devices with decent SoCs.
Personally, I'm waiting for the day you can hack PostmarketOS onto a phone and just use it as a phone, but that's not going to happen any time soon on closed hardware.
> Personally, I'm waiting for the day you can hack PostmarketOS onto a phone and just use it as a phone, but that's not going to happen any time soon on closed hardware.
For a select few devices, my personal favorite being the Xiaomi Poco F1 [0], [1] (despite afaik needing Windows to unlock its bootloader), this is already true. Sure, that's not "every phone", but at least one relatively available and nice (for the price) phone.
Readit News
Even so, that does not excuse the rest of the story and hopefully they can improve. A friend of mine also had some frustration with communicating with their customer service (which appeared outsourced or incompetent).
[0]: https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PinePhone_Pro#Troubleshooting
They are mainly linux smartphone hackers. If I would buy a device, I would consider it a donation if something goes wrong and not expect something to be able to work with. But that part should probably be made clearer. I also cannot say they are fully to blame, I found their website clear enough that there is no real quality control or support. But if I would have believed certain internet enthusiasts, I would be sad because of broken promises regarding stability. At least basic working functionality by now would have been nice.
Still, things are maybe getting there.
"It's incredible... how much the PinePhone experience improved in the meantime"
If they take your money for a product, then they are professionals for handling consumer cases, they are obliged to be.
They might not want to be, in which case they should hire people who do want to be.
> a lack of notifications, something I as a "my phone is in silent mode, no it does not even vibrate, I mean it when I say silent"
> when I dropped my PinePhones I was lucky enough to not break them, I am not affected by a failing WiFi/BT chip (an issue not too uncommon by my anecdata)
> I remember attempting to bring the factory image up-to-date around the date devices shipped and ending up with it in a state where at least the GUI wouldn't come up after all
> writing an update in gedit, running Firefox with ~20 tabs for hours would have been plainly impossible without multiple reboots and likely some unfortunate data loss in the meantime
If this blog post is trying to convince me never to get a PinePhone, it's doing an excellent job.
Maybe I should have highlighted the personal success stories I have had more (contributing to mobile-config-firefox, evaluating tons of apps, creating issues and seeing them getting fixed) - but I really don't like bragging.
I have one as a backup in case I get robbed or something. It's nice for me to know the state of things.
Multiple days of idle with Phosh on pmOS, for one anecdote.
Wake-up on notifications is still a WIP AIUI, though.
I recently got back to mine with a fresh install and a lot has improved since last year.
> My hardware has held up well, [...], I am not affected by a failing WiFi/BT chip (an issue not too uncommon by my anecdata). [...]
> I know, some people will wonder if they should buy a PinePhone after reading this, and I can't really answer this question for you. Read up on PINE64's return policy, maybe; check whether your current phone network is compatible and decide whether you could live with the available applications. Watch some videos and decide if you can live with the time Firefox takes to launch and a lack of notifications. Make sure to have the willingness and time to tinker, to get the deeper "Linux knowledge" necessary if you don't have it, to make whatever distribution you start with your own [...]"
...so, to sum up, if you want a nerdy toy to tinker with, get a PinePhone. If you want something that works "out of the box", go look somewhere else.
The more I interact with both Android and iOS - the less I want to live in that world. I'm tired of products changing underneath me because
"our metrics indicate that [insert ui change here] creates a 1.7% increase in user conversion from unpaid to paid seats"
or
"our metrics indicate that [feature] is heavily used by our most active paying customers, but most new subscribers don't use it at all - we need to push [feature] in their face so they become very active paying customers like the current users of [feature]!"
or
"Do you want to hear about all our products? I know you paid for no ads, but we're not showing you an ad - just a promotion that lets you know that there's a new product that we've just released. Also - Did I mention that our partners have also released a new product that we'll be promoting to you in just a moment! Isn't that great! Also - these aren't ads."
And it's EVERYWHERE in those ecosystems, even in the companies that aren't blatantly disregarding your privacy for their own profit by just directly selling your data wholesale to the highest bidder.
So at least for me, I really REALLY want something open source and usable in the phone sized device space.
---
All that said - I have a pinephone, and it isn't there yet for me. But it's tantalizingly close.
I am just getting sceptical, if that ever will happen. I know that I am also not helping for it to happen, but sorry, I had my share of weird linux driver issues.
It'll be awful for years. But if many people with my skills & elbow grease levels marinates with it for a few years, it could become special.
It takes guts to be amazing, after all!
Dino generates notifications when I get messages, mutt rings the terminal bell when I get email (if I cared I could pretty easily have it generate a toast notification too.) If you treat the thing like a desktop rather than a phone then most of the software will "just work" occasionally needing a small amount of glue to deal with things like the suspend/wake cycle to save battery life while still allowing for notifications etc.
The Pinephone is very much the "just install gentoo" of phones. Most people who actually use it are going to have radically different configurations and experiences.
Complaining that a software stack developed by volunteers is not good enough for you is quite entitled.
Five to seven hours of idle battery life is basically competing with the Steam Deck on who empties the battery quicker. This is before I have mentioned the ghost town of apps that you can't show to anyone if one asks: 'Does it have Instagram?'
Another reason why this device was dead before it has even arrived.
You did not read the full paragraph nor the paragraph after the one you quoted, right? (If you took the time and read them, I really should stop.)
Also, yes, there's no Instagram client I know of (and thus none is listed on https://linuxphoneapps.org), but Facebook properties and a privacy-adjacent, nerdy developer crowd somehow don't go well together.
Dead Comment
Here is my wishlist for hardware changes to the Pinephone:
1. Fix the emmc so that it runs fast. There is a known issue with the emmc that it runs at half its max speed. It can be trivially fixed in hardware (and Pine64 even recommends a solder based hardware mod) but Pine64 keeps selling phones with slow EMMC. This would solve some (though not all) of the perceived slowness of the Pinephone.
2. Usable hardware kill switches. You will notice that the article doesn't even mention the hardware switches for the camera/microphone/WiFi/BT/cellular. This is because the switches are A) under the back cover and B) too small to flip with a finger (requiring a toothpick or similar). Purism got this right by making the switches usable.
3. Add a "diffusor" to the LED notification light so that it is more visible from all angles and doesn't make an obvious spot on the ceiling in a dark room.
The software bugs are numerous and I would not yet recommend a Pinphone to anybody who doesn't enjoy using the command-line on a phone.
Also, Pine64 for years has listed replacement battery in their store but they have listed it as Out of Stock. As batteries are the part of a phone that must be replaced every couple of years and because it can be dangerous to use batteries of ill repute, Pine64 should actually sell replacement batteries.
Regarding replacement batteries: There are some brands that make okay/fine replacement batteries, I am quite happy with the one I've written about in another comment on here. But yes: They should be available in a perfect world, but given current global supply chain problems, it's understandable that they are not at all times.
E.g., the battery wouldn't charge in the phone. I bought an external charger, and this seems fine, but ideally I'd like a backup battery so that I can charge one while I use the other. But pine64 batteries have been out of stock for ages. Their wiki says "The supplied battery is meant to be compatible with Samsung part number EB-BJ700BBC / BBE / CBE from the 2015 J7 phone": I bought the CBE one, but it's such a tight fit that I'm terrified of using it in case it explodes or something. I have no idea where to get a proper pine battery from. And the forums are not exactly flooding with activity when I asked my question (https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=16851)
Beyond that, a lot of the stuff that is supposed to work on Pinephone, turns out doesn't work in the Pinephone Pro. In particular, the multiboot sd-card demo (https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=11347&pid=77027#...), which I was really keen to try, because I found the 'stock' distribution that came with the phone pretty ugly and useless (to my needs, anyway). I had the Jolla phone in the past, and I was very happy with it, so I may try to install Sailfish when I get the time to figure out 'if' it's possible, and if so how ...
But for now the pinephone pro is just sitting there, waiting for a compatible battery to show up, and me to find the energy to experiment with a compatible OS, before I'm even going to use the phone for anything even remotely productive. I'm gutted.
I received the Pinephone Keyboard a little more than a week ago. Ordered it because I thought it would revive my motivation to use the Pinephone, because it would turn it into a cool mini linux laptop.
However, since receiving it, I wasn't able to get it working. According to the community the pins don't always make a connection to the phone and you have to shim it, while risking to break something. The keyboard charges the phone and all the required drivers are installed, but typing just wont work.
Overall I still really like the idea of the Pinephone. But since receiving it in 2020 and recently receiving the keyboard I had to spend 90% of the time using it for debugging, fixing, reinstalling OS after breaking upgrades etc. and am now at a point where I just don't care about this device anymore. Because during the 10% when I can actually use it, it is just way to slow.
I of course knew what I was getting into and know that it's still in a dev phase.
My favourite OS to use is DanctNIX with SXMO, btw.
Initially, I got no response from the keyboard so I started reading up about it. The first think I found is that when you've got the phone attached to the keyboard, you mustn't use the phone socket for charging as it can fry the electronics (something about the charger chip in the keyboard, I believe) - only use the keyboard socket for charging when connected.
Then, after worrying about whether I'd fried a brand new device, I discovered that after a software update, the keyboard suddenly started working. However, the top row of keys weren't working well and required a stern press for them to activate, so I hit the forums again looking for a solution. Some people were making shims for the top row of keys, but then I found a post going into detail as to why the keys had trouble activating. Apparently, the rubber doesn't have enough room to squish down, so an easy solution (if you have a dremel) is to remove the top row keycaps and remove a mm of material from the top edge of each keys (the side nearest the hinge). Took me about ten minutes and now they work perfectly.
Still haven't found a good use case for it though as the screen is short and wide so not great for terminal hacking.
Although to be honest, after using mine for a month I gave up for various reasons such as upgrades breaking things.
https://twitter.com/marekgibney/status/1276881389091278848
I have to say that I never found a use case for it.
I remember that I hated the OS it came with. I think it was some flavor of Ubuntu that did not let you install software in any normal way. If I remember correctly, I did not even manage to get vim running.
After some reading up on mobile Linux distros, I switched to Mobian, which I generally liked.
But then I noticed that the phone wakes up and turns on the screen at random intervals. And quite often. Never found a solution to fix this. The web is full of reports about it:
https://www.google.com/search?q=pinephone+wakes+up
I watched the development around it for a while and contributed some details about the issue. Checked back every few weeks and did not see any progress. Then forgot about the phone at some point.
Honestly the browser, google maps (which works in the browser), whatsapp, SMS, phone calls, alarm, stop watch, camera... that's really about all I use on a phone. If I can find a linux device to switch that does that, I'll switch in a heartbeat. Phones are the least pleasant part of my "digital life" because of their toy operating systems.
https://element.io/blog/ems-launches-fully-managed-matrix-br...
And there are a bunch of Matrix clients for Mobile Linux (I use Nheko, but Fluffychat is quite good as well)
From what I've read online the SoC is quite slow compared to most modern smart phones so your mileage may vary. Sadly, the mobile phone market is as closed down as ever, making it very challenging to get any kind of open source system to get calls or texts. There's a reason they shoved an external chip in there!
If you want an open, somewhat limited but usable smartphone experience, check out Sailfish. They've been in the mobile phone market for years and their original base in Android makes the OS compatible with quite a few devices with decent SoCs.
Personally, I'm waiting for the day you can hack PostmarketOS onto a phone and just use it as a phone, but that's not going to happen any time soon on closed hardware.
For a select few devices, my personal favorite being the Xiaomi Poco F1 [0], [1] (despite afaik needing Windows to unlock its bootloader), this is already true. Sure, that's not "every phone", but at least one relatively available and nice (for the price) phone.
[0] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Xiaomi_Poco_F1_(xiaomi-be...
[1] https://tilvids.com/w/3mn337s4Mx2WPSHRX3KJsz