Yes! Another option -- however, Purism are pursuing two challenges at once, developing both the software and the hardware. Pinephone just focuses on hardware.
I'm a causal user looking for a Linux phone. I want a non-proprietary OS and I want to support open source. I'm willing to give up a lot to get that. But Pinephone isn't quite there yet. I know it will be someday!
The PinePhone will be launching soon, and you could install any flavor of mobile Linux you want if you are still interested in owning a smart phone: https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/
I've been playing with my pinephone a bit (2GB postmarketOS). Overall I think it's awesome and I love having a real linux machine in such a nice package. The build quality is much better than expected.
That said, Firefox is extremely slow and crashes a lot. Getting a fast stable browser seems like priority #1 to me. If these things are ever going to take off they need apps, and I think web apps (for better or for worse) are the quickest way to get a decent number of apps.
I'm not sure if it's simply a hardware issue (can't expect too much for 150USD), or a software optimization problem. I don't have a cheap Android phone to compare to.
I really hope what comes out of all this, is developers and money flowing into linux phones. Pinephone looks good in theory but it sounds like it is not there yet.
We need more options than just Android or iOS. Sure Android is "open sourced" but we all know its limited without all the Google things also installed.
I've had the first gen PinePhone and my view on it is that this is not really a mass market device yet.
The PinePhone is just too slow to use. It's frustratingly unresponsive.
I hoped the LibreM would be fast enough to make the phone usable.
And then after that, there need to be apps that work, but the Free Phone ecosystem is fractured. There's Android derivatives such as the Lineage or /e/ OS, there are pure Linux variants running Phosh, which was developed by Pureism, but also runs on Mobian and postmarketOS, and there is Plasma Mobile, and UBPorts, as well as GerdaOS, which is based on KaiOS, which is a fork of FirefoxOS.
You can buy a PinePhone now (well, when they are back in stock). It's a decent phone with a completely open Linux stack. The UI might be a bit sluggish, but it is a fully functioning smartphone.
If you want to see more apps targeting a third platform, then you should buy one of these phones.
None of the distributions on the PinePhone work well for all the things that people use that little computer in their pocket (which is no longer just a phone) for. For maps, for instance, all of the PinePhone's choices are little more than lightweight tech demos compared to, say, OSMAnd on Android. There is no official Signal client, no powerful browser beyond the clunky Desktop-Firefox-for-Postmarket-OS hack, etc.
It is unlikely that "all the work that would need to be done" to make the PinePhone as useful as an Android phone (even with pure libre software) will even get done. The problem is that the PinePhone is just too underpowered in CPU and RAM, comparable to devices from many years ago. Plus, the PinePhone dev community just doesn’t appear to be large and motivated enough to cover all the bases of e.g. battery optimization that the corporate mobile developers have done.
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