Furilabs Linux Phone

Apparently it is based on Halium, so it's probably not going to run mainline Linux any time soon. On the other hand, I'm less happy with Android than I pretty much ever have been, so having some more options outside of relatively unusable Linux phones and being stuck with modified Android firmware certainly does not hurt.

I am definitely interested, especially if the team working on it is as active as it seems they are. Definitely one of the biggest bummers with PinePhone and PinePhone Pro was realizing that the community was largely on its own; that could work well, but in practice progress has been slow and painful and I stopped paying attention.

I would really like to see more projects doing cellular Linux devices in general. It doesn't need to be a candybar smartphone, if someone can jam a cellular modem into a MicroPC I'm sold at any price I can afford.

I work on this device. We are currently QAing the latest update with our community, which contains a lot of goodies and improvements shaped directly from community feedback. You can see previous changelogs at https://furilabs.com/changelog

I am obviously a little biased, but this is probably the first Linux phone that people can actually use. Someone in our community switched from iPhone to this without much of an issue.

Since you guys are running Gnome, you might be interested in helping with (or funding) this native GTK WhatsApp client: https://github.com/tobagin/whakarere/

Since these days something like >90% of people is on WhatsApp, it’s beyond quintessential to have a good WhatsApp client.

My biggest hold-up with that sort of work is that Facebook has previously threatened to ban users who use third-party clients, and then they have gone through with the threat. Is this no longer the case?

Has a well-behaved third party client ever been an issue?. A third party client that does things like retain deleted messages, report that read receipts are enabled but never actually sends them or other 'anti-social' behaviors is definitely asking to get banned.