PinePhone Pro [GNU/Linux smartphone] has been discontinued

The PinePhone Pro just wasn't a very good product. There was frankly unnecessary drama regarding the bootloader of all things, which was a bad start. The specs were obviously a bad value compared to any mass-produced phone, though it did bring the Linux phone down to a price point where an enthusiast could reasonably buy it, so I can't say it was priced that poorly. But, the big problem was software. Getting the damn device to work reliably was a true pain in the ass. If you could get "deep" sleep to work, then it would last longer than a couple hours on battery, which was nice... But sleep/resume on the device was buggy and slow. Getting a phone call can wake the device, but by the time it actually wakes up you might've already missed the call. And audio routing for calls was shockingly ugly... Most of the time it was routed directly by the hardware, bypassing the Linux audio stack entirely, but it was quite flexible and you could route it into Pipewire/etc. The microphone quality is "it works" tier, though the person on the other end may be occasionally alarmed by a flash bang of noise for unknown reasons. There are two piss-quality cameras that sometimes work for a little bit until they stop working.

I waited a long time and occasionally checked to see if anything had changed, but it was clear that Pine64 had again taken the approach of "build it and they will come" hoping for other people to clean up the mess and make the phone usable. And to be fair, they were up front about this, to some degree, but they built it and nobody really came. The truth is it's just too damn hard for random people to fix all of the software issues on a device like this, especially when it's basically not usable as a daily driver yet. Working on a device like this is a full-time job, and you can't really replace that full-time job with 20 hobbyist weekends stacked in a trenchcoat. I did realize this when I bought one, with full intent to be one of those hobbyists spending weekends on it, but at least to me, it was simply too broken.

So I think the PinePhone experiment is a failure. Then there's the Librem 5, which I presume is at least more stable and usable, but it's at a price that is less easy to stomach.

I think until the software is ready and a market is proven, the best route for Linux phones is going to be by taking Android phone parts and trying to make it run regular Linux, a la libhybris. It may not really work out either, but it does seem like it is a path of significantly less resistance, where the software can be worked on with solid hardware and hopefully solid enough drivers to build on.

There are some folks working on this angle, too. The latest I've seen is the Liberux NEXX, no idea how it's going, not affiliated in any way.

https://liberux.net/