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> How many hundreds or thousands of enthusiasts are needed before it's suitable to be a daily driver?

Zero. What is needed is a few hundred developers writing actually code to make it useful. The enthusiasts are at best nice to haves. You can blur the line if you write good bug reports, but right now the pinephone doesn't need end users.

The above will change over time. Millions of users would be enough to force carriers to support activating it on their network, something that developers cannot do (at least not legally). Likewise large numbers of users would be enough to those banking apps written. However today millions of users wouldn't make any difference to the important parts of making it work (except in so far as users sometimes become developers)

Enthusiasts with wallets are another story.

All my banks function just nice on my phone without any apps. There is one magic app that makes it happen, it's called a WWW browser.

> How many hundreds or thousands of enthusiasts are needed before it's suitable to be a daily driver?

I know your question was rhetorical, but when I think about this, it took close to 20 years of Linux maturing on the desktop before I felt comfortable handing a family member a laptop running Linux. As an enthusiast, I started running it much earlier, but everyday tasks like "printing" or "using Wi-Fi" prevented it from being a daily driver.

Personal computing, though, had a much deeper hacker culture, that encouraged pushing the hardware to its limits, and doing new and novel things with it. Progress stemmed from that (Windows including BSD sockets, for instance). I've never seen anything similar in the phone ecosystem - as soon as you play outside of the walled garden, you drop off into fringe territory. And the PinePhone, as much as I love it, is by definition outside of the walled garden.

I'm not sure, given the culture around phones, we might ever get to the point of it being viable.

One problem is even governments support only the duopoly of smartphone makers. For example, try downloading a "Covid App" for a Linux phone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_apps

In my state, the "app" is actually a website (https://myirmobile.com/).

I'd be quite happy to _not_ be able to download "Covid App", whatever that is, on my phone. So, what's a bug for some is a valuable feature to others.

It's the slippery slope that's the problem.

It's kinda weird anyway, for showing a QR code it being an app adds no benefit. You can just print the QR code and keep it in your pocket. It's valid for 1 year in most places.

On iOS PassBook would be the ideal place for this, not a separate app.

I do have mine on my phone but just in case.. Here we don't need the code unless we go to the disco, and I'm too old for that anyway.

Either way I'm vaccinated so code or not I've done the right thing :)

Even though I'm vaccinated, I have no interest whatsoever of proving it with any kind of "code", "star of David" or whatever the fuck Faucists want me to prove it with.

It’s less bleak than one might think:

For tracing, at least Sailfish OS has an app called Contrac [1]. I looked into porting it over to other PinePhone OS, but with the CRUST and deep sleep, it would not really be useful there anyway (as it would not be active most of the time).

Regarding QR certificates, there’s Vakzination [2].

[1] https://www.flypig.co.uk/contrac

[2] https://invent.kde.org/plasma-mobile/vakzination

> I check in on it every l every 6 months or so, update my pinephone and give it a few days.

Why did you buy the phone? They pretty much shout that they are only targeting developers who can bring about your dream. They never promised what you're expecting of them.

> if they corralled all of the effort and enthusiasm currently scattered amongst a dozen (!) different OSes and communities, they could establish a high quality functional baseline.

If Apple and Microsoft combined efforts on Mac OS/Windows, they'd do amazing things too - but that's not going to happen either: once formed, organizations expend significant energy in self-perpertuating. Perhaps you could pick a promising project (or a couple of complementary ones), and support them technically or financially.

TBH I think having a flutter port for this operating mobile system is probably the most likely way for it to succeed. That way you can do a flutter app and it will work on this too, while still having mainline OS support.

Then you would need to fill in some common services like push and such.

Or run an Android or iOS emulator. (Note: like Wine runs Windows software on Linux in a fully legal way).

I think that is actually counter productive, since the emulated apps will always be shittier than their native counterparts, and you need to constantly deal with telemetry shims for Apple & Google lest the apps wont work properly.

It's desktop Linux, so you can do this now! I know of at least one Flutter app available as a Flatpak on ARM Linux (FluffyChat).

Yeah it's really close already and has adoption in the mobile world, which is why I would suggest the community adopt that vs something else like mobile gtk. I dunno how optimized flutter desktop for linux is for the mobile version, maybe all it will take is a view port change and implementing some more mobile orientated apis like location & orientation changes.

The most likely way to succeed would be to jump on the PWA bandwagon, IMO.

I think both would be necessary.

> How many hundreds or thousands

Hundreds of millions. That's how many you need for mainstream apps to be built.

Even Microsoft couldn't get past that hurdle and money is not a problem for them.

Android compatibility might help somewhat but it will undermine the usefulness of the open platform by introducing the very things it fights against. The OS is not the only problem. Apps can still datamine the Android layer then. You won't be much better off than with a privacy focused Android fork.

Android is a much better base to start from anyway. At least that has a somewhat coherent security model.

> How many hundreds or thousands of enthusiasts are needed before it's suitable to be a daily driver?

I just need a WhatsApp client. Enthusiasts once made one but WhatsApp started banning their users.

I don't know if fragmented is the right word. Just like desktop Linux, mobile Linux has pretty much settled on one major standard (Phosh a la Gnome) and slightly less popular alternative (Plasma Mobile a la KDE). Sure, you can go about customizing it to your whims, but fragmentation isn't nearly that bad, especially since the distribution options are so much lesser.

The problem really is getting the commercial software people want on the phone. But if you just want to use it as a phone (e.g. no special apps or mobile games), it does most of that in a pretty streamlined manner (albeit, rougher than the commercial options).