Pine phone Junior, message phone ?

[wibble]

Thanks - hadn't spotted that one. Unfortunately it seems abandoned - https://gitlab.com/project-pris/system hasn't seen any commits in a year.

Looks interesting but as you say there's been no activity for quite a while. Also nothing there yet for those of us in the US.

bananahackers.net has more info on KaiOS based phones and how to get more control over them. It seems you can root them, then edit the manifest files to make the built-on apps from Google, Facebook etc. removable instead of permanent. After that you can remove them through its normal app manager. There's other stuff there too, but the intractable problem seems to be that running a browser-based OS on a slow processor makes for a very laggy user experience.