The thing you’ve got to keep in mind is this is very much first-gen tech. So it’s best not to compare this to any current gen phones or standards. Think of it as year 1 Android, minus being backed by huge companies. It’s honestly amazing we have this at all, and for free because of the hard work the community has put into the OSes!

Even still, things are improving incredibly rapidly in the software department with things like CRUST, which is a battery and sleep optimization of sorts. So for how young the project is, and how truly complicated this really is, the current state of it is super impressive, along with the speed of its improvements. That’s why the review is marked as positive.

If this doesn’t make you want to buy the phone, that’s totally cool! It’s a review so other people can know how the phone functions in its current state, not a piece of advertisement.

For the current market the pinephone is very cheap. Even cheap phones usually go around $200 new. Also people are lowering their expectations because they know this isn’t going to be good compared to even old android versions in terms of usability. This is a whole new world of mobile operating systems and as such it’s going to take a long time to get to be even close to usable for the general consumer.

I don’t really think there’s an end goal in mind for these projects, besides getting things like CRUST and Calls and Messaging figured out as soon as they can. They’re just trying to provide an alternative to typical phone OSes like Android and iOS while trying to provide a full Linux experience in your pocket.

SailfishOS lets you run Android apps, and some of the other available OSes let you install Anbox so you can sort of run some apps. I think people shouldn’t go in just expecting to run Android apps. The point is to get away from the Android/iOS ecosystem and embrace a growing mobile Linux ecosystem.

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