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?
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?
I’d say it didn’t fail. It was never really a consumer phone. It was an attempt to get hardware in the hands of developers, and it achieved that.
Other posts here discuss why it didn’t receive wider adoption.
I daily drove my PinePhone until I could no longer receive MMS messages, since my service provider has a different APN for the internet and MMS. That, and the modem became more unreliable over time. I like my PinePhone, but an average user would never adopt it as it is.
Except it absolutely did. Sure, it got hardware in the hands of developers, but that effort didn’t amount to anything. Pinebook paved the way for Pinebook Pro, which made good on company’s promise of an open, affordable, low power laptop for Linux enthusiasts.
This never materialized with Pinephone, it didn’t even mature enough to satisfy most of the early adopters, who for the most part only wanted reliable calling and texting.