mobian, pinephone camera, and megapixels

[dukla2000]

... Now I'm admittedly not familiar with the image processing tools, but if I understand correctly the script uses tiff format as an intermediate step to get to jpg (dng-->tiff-->jpg). Tiff format as far as I know is not widely used for photos and seems kind of a waste, would it be feasible to convert directly from dng to jpg to save processing time?
...

Yes but ...!
Technically imagemagick could do a direct conversion .dng -> .jpg. The "but" is that dcraw is doing more than just a format conversion, it is using some magic options (chosen by Martijn) to try make the picture look better as per the comments in the postprocess script. dcraw cannot output .jpg though. But again the megapixels choice to use imagemagick to do the conversion to .jpg also allows the chance to get imagemagick to try sharpen things.

Or you could cut out most of the (megapixels) postprocessing and use a package like RawTherapee to process your images.

The fundamental limitation though is the inexpensive sensors chosen by Pine64 are pretty much point and click cheapos and so no amount of postprocessing can turn me into David Bailey! Then again, even with slightly expensive kit I struggle to get stuff in focus so having the PinePhone for quick snaps is fine by me.