Why is the PPP still $400 and no stable OS?

[Peter Gamma]

After I had installed LibreOffice on my Pinephone on postmarkedOS and connected it to the PP keyboard which worked great in this setup, I urgently needed a privacy phone. But this setup constantly crashed. I had to take out the battery and then reset date and time.

So I bought a GrapheneOS phone. The Swiss Ricardo seller asked me: „do you want Android or GrapheneOS on your phone?“ What a kind seller. And now I bought a third phone to flash  iodéOS on it. To use my Pinephone as a privacy phone is gone for me personally for the moment.

But I invested a lot of time in LibreOffice on the Pinephone:

https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=16614

I gave this project up, too, altough it is great in principle. Which other smartphone can run LibreOffice exept for the Pinephone? 

I gave up the Pinephone keyboard, too, since it seems not to come back. But I found an alternative which works fine with the Pinephone after a first test, and that is the Rii mini 4:

https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=19352

With other Bluetooth keyboards I had issues when connected to the Pinephone, but not with the  Rii mini 4

[biketool]

If a product contains linux without user control or root or ability to change the software or OS it is not terribly different form one which contains a microsoft NT kernel or one of the closed commercial real time OSs.
The question is who is the actual user, a telephone company, a national government, a search engine company, or the end user, it is a kind of tivo-ization(see below).
It can be a mix of all of the above, between the FOSS components de-googled android derivative distros can be reasonably non-google and telephone company friendly, but that is pretty much a hack and bending of the initial intent, de-googled android is to get easy hardware compatibility but is somewhat akin to running windows programs on Wine, it works but is not functional by design rather by hack.
Fully documented select hardware on a fully FOSS stack is top to bottom is by design for the user, even if it doesn't have the cutting edge performance found on secrets and lies hack-compatible components provide in the boot and drivers part of the stack inside a hacked OS surrounding them like a mostly FOSS android build might.
Another thing Pinephone does which you will NEVER see in an android is it does not provide wiring for DMA(direct memory access) to the modularized modem, even though our Pine ax-25 modem runs a separate android derived OS but it is not able to interact directly with the system memory, we also have some great work on making a mostly cleaned and neutered FOSS software stack on the modem module. That standard modem chip on all apple and android devices is another full computer which the designer and maybe the telephone company or national government control and the user DOES NOT! But it does have full access to your system memory and every running process; control and surveillance access are built in and cannot be disabled.
We also have the paranoia switches(I can take credit for these which are inherited from back in the Neo900 design phase) which let you hardware power-disable the modem, cameras, and BT/WiFi, there are only niche situations these are important but once we have Lora or POCSAG pager input it would allow a completely radio-silent untrackable mobile device.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_o...patibility

[Kevin Kofler]

btw, do you remember freedomphone by eric finman ! almost like a scam product. ironically based on mediatek chips. mediatek's chip security was very questionable.

As I already pointed out, the BraX3 is also based on a Mediatek SoC (MediaTek Dimensity 6300). (Source: this Notebookcheck article.)

The description in the link says it can run Ubuntu Touch, so I am not sure what you are referring to with "probably not compatible with mainline-kernel-based GNU/Linux."

As I also already pointed out, Ubuntu Touch is not mainline-kernel-based. It uses Android kernels and Halium:

Why does Ubuntu Touch use the Android kernel?
We rely on the Android Linux kernel and drivers to make the phone work. This is the reality in the world of Android hardware.

The only exception being the "native ports", which, as you can see on https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io/, are only the 4 PINE64 device ports (and an old Raspberry Pi 3 port of the ancient Ubuntu Touch 16.04 that was never updated to 20.04).

[zetabeta]

... in my last android device, which i'm not going to name. ...

just to clarify.

it wasn't my last android, it was my last android i seriously used.

i bought cheap android somewhat recently for certain testing purposes. basically try to remove google components and some others without rooting or unlocking bootloader. it wasn't easy but i manage to do it. adb was needed and adb shell, normal user interface wasn't enough. one thing is weird, there was "facebook lite" app. why there is facebook app, when it is totally third party app for both manufacturer and google.

[KC9UDX]

I haven't had one yet that didn't have multiple third party apps baked in. And there are always these benign-named ones like "Device Configuration", "System", etc that run once in a while, use and keep data, but don't seem to matter in any way if you delete them. But the ones that bother me are the super-furtive manufacturer update, provider update, and android update apps which run most of the time. The ones you can't remove at all, but you can kill them whenever and it doesn't matter (it shouldn't). But they are super chatty and connect to all kinds of crazy places all the time. They use significant system resources and frequently bring the UI to a halt. And GBoard which is there even if you delete it. Even though there's a manufacturer-branded keyboard that's also unremovable.

The thing I found out you really shouldn't delete is the Google TTS stuff. It's very hard to get a properly working TTS system without that.

[pineconeuser]

Just wanted to add: You're buying the pinephone pro HARDWARE. Not buying the software.

When I bought my Pinephone Pro I did so knowing I was buying hardware which may or may not have the support completed in software. The entire point of the pinephone pro and pinephone is to get the phone into hands of developers...

In a world where the only other gnu/linux phone costs $1,500, I think the pinephone pro is a good deal.