UBports on pine phone?

[KNERD]

You are really comparing apples and oranges there.

Android phone makers can rely on 1. a fully developed userspace from the tech giant Google, 2. drivers developed (as proprietary blobs that the phone maker can just ship as is) by the component chip manufacturers, and perhaps most crucially, 3. lots of profits from high-volume unit sales, which can be used to fund software development. That is what being part of the mainstream gains you. Mobile GNU/Linux is not a mainstream platform, so Pine64 gets none of all these.

There is only one competitor in this niche market, developing one comparable product. Yes, that competitor does invest money in software development. But as a result, their phone costs so much that you can get multiple PinePhones or even PinePhone Pros for the price of one of the competitor's phones. (Assuming that you can even get one of the competitor's units shipped at all. They have a long waiting list, apparently due to liquidity issues because they spent so much of their money on software development.)

Think what you want of Pine64's business model, but it appears to be the only way to produce affordable GNU/Linux smartphones.

That is completely not true.

You are forgetting Apple which was considered late to the Cell Phone Market. People are paying a premium for those phones and the OS which comes with it. And you know what? People who purchase the PinePhone (PP) or PinePhone Pro (PPP) are paying premiums also for those phones and not even getting a fully functional OS. Last year, I bought a Samsung Android based phone which blows away the specs of PPP, but for the Price of the PP.


Then Microsoft finally caught up in the mobile OS space with their Windows Phone 8. A really nice OS which finally gained some ground. Companies had been paying Microsoft a huge licensing fee to use that OS, and one could still get a phone with equal or better specs than the PP or PPP for the same or less price. I have a Windows 10 phone from 2016 (Alcatel One Touch Plus - even has a VoLTE modem) which I still use where I paid around 2/3 the price of the PP with specs which are a little better than the PP.

The tech from the PP is well over 10 years in age now. When is a price drop coming after nearly 4 years, and still no OS?


Oh, and  here is Wyze (not a tech giant - and for profit) with a fully functioning smart watch for about the same price as the Pine64 watch.

https://www.wyze.com/products/wyze-watch-44mm

How long has the Pine64 watch been out, and still no fully functioning OS?