So much Pine64-bashing and quite a lot of factual errors.
There were several pinephone HW revisions that fixed HW issues based on direct developer feedback. Yeah, there was no direct communication with HW engineers, but at least the critically important feedback was applied (otherwise modem would not be able to wake up Pinephone SoC from sleep and Alt-D over USB-C would not work at all, and probably bunch of other things I barely remember). I or someone else in #pinedev could tell TL Lim, and if change was reasonable it would be made. There was quite lively discussion around HW issues in #pinedev early on. And company did not seem to lack effort, eg. for Pinephone keyboard there were like 5 revisions, including doing an X-Ray analysis of burned down keyboard MCU and subsequent citcuit improvement. So communication to get HW changes was possible, and was usually via TL Lim, not via HW devs.
"The volunteers working on the PinePhone's kernel generally didn't [upstream]" is factually completely wrong.
PinePhone DT was mainlined for Linux 5.7 by me. smaeul rewrote the sun8i-codec driver and did lot of stability and other work, anarsoul upstreamed Bluetooth and maintained Lima, and many many many more small upstream contributions by different people (git log is your friend), just on the kernel side. People created entire new upstream projects like Crust and p-boot and levinboot, etc.
Yes, there's some long residual stack of patches, but so what? Accurate statement is that some perhaps critical work stayed out-of-tree, partly by choice and partly due to upstream rejections or dependencies, and not that "the volunteers generally didn't upstream." The claim is overstated to the point of being misleading.
And another thing is that even if there was lack of upstreaming, almost no Anroid phone is fully upstream in Linux and it doesn't prevent it from gaining marketshare. Downstream kernels suffice for it.
Latest version of supported downstream kernel for pinephones with good HW support has been available for years. Almost no Android phone can even claim that for their downstream kernel.
Then there's over-estimation in the article of how upstreaming to kernel is important. You can easily say that having full HW support quickly in some downstream kernel is kinda preferable, because it allowed people to actually use the phone sooner, and allowed userspace development to progress. If every change would have to go to upstream, with its long iteration times, etc., people would not be able to use the phone at all for 4 years or so. How many would even stay around? :) I ceratinly prefered making the HW work and work well, over upstreaming. I understand upstream kernel is a distro maintainer wish. People are free to have wishes. :D
Pushing upstream changes coordination of work and to some extent simplifies maintenance for some, while making it way harder for others in the community.
The article says PPP "still had major software problems when its sales were cancelled in August 2025.". Yeah, no. Pinephone Pro has almost full kernel support, multiple bootloaders, even graphics/touch support for U-Boot, etc. There are no SW kernel issues that I'm aware off that were not solved years ago. Yes, again, you need a downstream kernel, but it's been maintained for every release for years since the beginning, just like PP. It's very similar situation to Raspberry Pi, which also sucks without downstream kernel, but did not prevent it from reaching marketshare, or whatever. Commercial cancellation is more lack of interest/commercial viability, rather than anything pointing to lack of SW support.
The article opens by promising to "examine what held back mobile Linux." Well, it consistently assigns blame to companies/vendors while treating the enormous volunteer engineering as background and blameless. Well it's not.
As for the company: Pine64 promissed 10 years of original Pinephone. It's so far delivering what? 8th year? At the same/similar pricing to 8 years ago, across all that happened in the HW industry in the meantime? Covid? Ramocalypse? I'd call that a massive success on promissed claim. The company also never promissed fully working OS/HW android experience. It promissed cheap accessible long-term stable HW product to jumpstart the ecosystem (paraphrasing from memory). And I thoroughly enjoyed developing and supporting Pinephone on the kernel side for 8 years release after release, building well designed (as far as UX goes) bootloaders, and interacting with TL Lim and wider community, etc.
"Once the best volunteers abandoned PINE64, the company hasn’t been able to complete the development of the PinePhone Pro, PineNote, PineTab2 and many of its other projects, so the people who ordered these devices are unlikely to ever be able to use them as fully functional devices."
Sooo. what HW support is lacking on Pinephone, Pinephone Pro or PineTab2 or Pinebook Pro, or other consumer products, if you take some downstream maintained kernel and use it? You'll find that very little of consequence is missing. I know of one: HW accelerated video encoding on original Pinephone. The only claim I see other than performance, is lack of "HW accelerated video encoding". But who would want to record videos with webcam level sensor that uses CAF for auto-focus? Has anyone even tried to imagine what it means practically when you get CAF full range sweep in the middle of the vide? :)
Performance is not really relevant to "level of SW support".
You can also say that perhaps people drifted off after the work was mostly done, because there was nothing more exiting to do, other than absolutely unsatisfying gruntwork that even paid engineers at most android shops don't bother to do.
There were several pinephone HW revisions that fixed HW issues based on direct developer feedback. Yeah, there was no direct communication with HW engineers, but at least the critically important feedback was applied (otherwise modem would not be able to wake up Pinephone SoC from sleep and Alt-D over USB-C would not work at all, and probably bunch of other things I barely remember). I or someone else in #pinedev could tell TL Lim, and if change was reasonable it would be made. There was quite lively discussion around HW issues in #pinedev early on. And company did not seem to lack effort, eg. for Pinephone keyboard there were like 5 revisions, including doing an X-Ray analysis of burned down keyboard MCU and subsequent citcuit improvement. So communication to get HW changes was possible, and was usually via TL Lim, not via HW devs.
"The volunteers working on the PinePhone's kernel generally didn't [upstream]" is factually completely wrong.
PinePhone DT was mainlined for Linux 5.7 by me. smaeul rewrote the sun8i-codec driver and did lot of stability and other work, anarsoul upstreamed Bluetooth and maintained Lima, and many many many more small upstream contributions by different people (git log is your friend), just on the kernel side. People created entire new upstream projects like Crust and p-boot and levinboot, etc.
Yes, there's some long residual stack of patches, but so what? Accurate statement is that some perhaps critical work stayed out-of-tree, partly by choice and partly due to upstream rejections or dependencies, and not that "the volunteers generally didn't upstream." The claim is overstated to the point of being misleading.
And another thing is that even if there was lack of upstreaming, almost no Anroid phone is fully upstream in Linux and it doesn't prevent it from gaining marketshare. Downstream kernels suffice for it.
Latest version of supported downstream kernel for pinephones with good HW support has been available for years. Almost no Android phone can even claim that for their downstream kernel.
Then there's over-estimation in the article of how upstreaming to kernel is important. You can easily say that having full HW support quickly in some downstream kernel is kinda preferable, because it allowed people to actually use the phone sooner, and allowed userspace development to progress. If every change would have to go to upstream, with its long iteration times, etc., people would not be able to use the phone at all for 4 years or so. How many would even stay around? :) I ceratinly prefered making the HW work and work well, over upstreaming. I understand upstream kernel is a distro maintainer wish. People are free to have wishes. :D
Pushing upstream changes coordination of work and to some extent simplifies maintenance for some, while making it way harder for others in the community.
The article says PPP "still had major software problems when its sales were cancelled in August 2025.". Yeah, no. Pinephone Pro has almost full kernel support, multiple bootloaders, even graphics/touch support for U-Boot, etc. There are no SW kernel issues that I'm aware off that were not solved years ago. Yes, again, you need a downstream kernel, but it's been maintained for every release for years since the beginning, just like PP. It's very similar situation to Raspberry Pi, which also sucks without downstream kernel, but did not prevent it from reaching marketshare, or whatever. Commercial cancellation is more lack of interest/commercial viability, rather than anything pointing to lack of SW support.
The article opens by promising to "examine what held back mobile Linux." Well, it consistently assigns blame to companies/vendors while treating the enormous volunteer engineering as background and blameless. Well it's not.
As for the company: Pine64 promissed 10 years of original Pinephone. It's so far delivering what? 8th year? At the same/similar pricing to 8 years ago, across all that happened in the HW industry in the meantime? Covid? Ramocalypse? I'd call that a massive success on promissed claim. The company also never promissed fully working OS/HW android experience. It promissed cheap accessible long-term stable HW product to jumpstart the ecosystem (paraphrasing from memory). And I thoroughly enjoyed developing and supporting Pinephone on the kernel side for 8 years release after release, building well designed (as far as UX goes) bootloaders, and interacting with TL Lim and wider community, etc.
"Once the best volunteers abandoned PINE64, the company hasn’t been able to complete the development of the PinePhone Pro, PineNote, PineTab2 and many of its other projects, so the people who ordered these devices are unlikely to ever be able to use them as fully functional devices."
Sooo. what HW support is lacking on Pinephone, Pinephone Pro or PineTab2 or Pinebook Pro, or other consumer products, if you take some downstream maintained kernel and use it? You'll find that very little of consequence is missing. I know of one: HW accelerated video encoding on original Pinephone. The only claim I see other than performance, is lack of "HW accelerated video encoding". But who would want to record videos with webcam level sensor that uses CAF for auto-focus? Has anyone even tried to imagine what it means practically when you get CAF full range sweep in the middle of the vide? :)
Performance is not really relevant to "level of SW support".
You can also say that perhaps people drifted off after the work was mostly done, because there was nothing more exiting to do, other than absolutely unsatisfying gruntwork that even paid engineers at most android shops don't bother to do.