Why doesn't the Pinephone come with a fingerprint reader? This is a real dealbreaker.
Here's the thing with smartphone peripherals: they're really hard to work with. Their vendors publish very little usable information about them, and getting them functional under mainline Linux requires a huge amount of work. Typically, smartphones get by with vendor BSPs, which are generally very old kernels stuffed with proprietary blobs. With the Pinephone (and other devices), we're trying to do better than that, and make a device that can run an up-to-date kernel.
Considering that a minimum-viable smartphone nominally needs to include
- Wi-Fi
- Bluetooth
- A cellular radio
- Two cameras, often from different vendors
- A bunch of position and environment sensors
- A touchscreen display
- At least one microphone and speaker, often more
- A sophisticated power management controller
and perhaps other things, adding in more extras would have significantly increased the already-massive workload on the people trying to get this thing working. The game right now is not to make the perfect smartphone; it's to make a phone that meets the absolute minimum criteria for a useful smartphone-type device. A fingerprint scanner is simply not a necessity compared to the other things I listed. Maybe it will be considered at some point down the line, but I don't really think it's reasonable for that to be considered a priority right now. The Pinephone is still relatively early in development, and if you really need polish and seamless user experience from your devices, then the Pinephone is not ready for you yet.
