Pinephone? Even the bare essentials or prerequisite for calling a device a phone, as in any communication features like phone calls or texting SMS, none work on Pinephone. Using it as like a mini-tablet to do browsing and linux type stuff, its not bad at all, an improvement over Nexus 5 due to newer hardware.

I am contributing nothing to the community other than criticism in that I don't write code, apps, etc. But constructive criticism, I wish the work on UBPorts started with getting the phone communication features to work as the priority BEFORE focusing on all the other computer web browsing, bash terminal, etc stuff.

I would like to see Pinephone be a phone first before a portable PC/Tablet, if that makes sense?

But back to the Pinephone, calls, SMS, most apps, don't work. Yeah Pinephone is a newer device than Nexus 5 and is more advanced hardware, but Nexus 5 plays way nicer with Ubuntu Touch, not even close. And when I speak of apps, I am not expecting iOS or Android levels of support as its just the great work of volunteers in the UBPort community, one of my favorites that runs on Nexus 5 and not Pinephone is Weber. It turns a webpage into an app icon, simple, but very useful app to create icons for your favorite pages.

Basically so far, Ubuntu TOuch Pinephone is useless as a commincations device or phone right now. Yeah, you can web browse and do some other linux stuff, but its currently nowhere near being an actual phone, sure as hell is nowhere near a daily driver.

Like, you would have a brick if you tried to do anything like the PinePhone with the Nexus 5 because its probably more than double the amount of work, but also, its very dismissive of all the actual work that people like Dalton have put into the project, like, maybe you have to have a good eye, but everyone works extremely hard on the Ubuntu Touch project, and UBports has put in a HUGE amount of effort to support the PinePhone, more effort has absolutely been put into the PinePhone than the Nexus 5 by the core team.

I dont know if you realize this, but its rare that the Nexus 5, OPO, FairPhone, even OP3 get device specific updates, a lot of the time, they get ported, and then left alone until something breaks them, or there's something that hasn't worked for a while and someones just decided to work on it for a bit.

Anyways the whole team needs a break, they all need time off, a good week or so time of rest, to do whatever be that bowling, going for walks, just sleeping, watching movies, or playing video games, they deserve a lot for what they do and have been able to do, and the amount of work thats gone into the PinePhone is, well, commendable!

So the foundation is focusing on rebasing Ubuntu Touch to Ubuntu 20.04 because the actual 16.04 is not supported anymore.
It is the logical choice and it will set a working base for any major update to come including work on the PinePhone.
Patching stuff on a soon discarded code base is a waste of time and effort, upgrading so the upcoming work will be time proof was the choice made.

No one is forgetting efforts on the Pinephone and it was again said by Dalton during the last Q&A. He needs to sleep, I want him to sleep so he can code better (and so he stays healthy ; that's a wish for everyone).

I mean Nexus 5 is good, but its a decade old, yet runs Ubuntu Touch well other than maybe MMS. Pinephone could be huge if only it was supported and developed. Pinephone should be a priority, the true linux based phone.

Look at the PinePhone forums. There are close to 20 different combinations of OS, window systems and other fundamental variables. Each has a small number of people working on many solutions to one problem. Add in all the phone models, and wow, I'm amazing anything gets done. There are a lot of heroes doing what they can. Compare that to Google or Apple, with all the engineers they have focused on one OS for a small number of phones.

I have a Nexus 4 running UBports. There are still things that don't work there. More generally, it's always amazed me that there isn't a mail client installed by default. Dekko 2 has been Experimental for a long time. Camera doesn't work. Other problems have been reported. This is an old phone which has pretty official-looking support in UBports. I don't think it's a daily driver.

I'd like to have Touch on my Moto G7 Play. Halium? Okay, I'll accept that. But, there are lots of problems with the result. I don't think that's a daily driver.

Many of the supported phones for UBports don't have everything working. Fairphone 2 is probably the closest functionally to the PinePhone. It is a six year old phone. Flashlight and hotspot are partially working. Battery life isn't great.

The installation process, the website, the apps all look great in UBports. Touch is a really nice looking and feeling phone OS. I keep trying it and will continue to do so because I remain hopeful.

For the PinePhone, Mobian is best for me. Import stuff doesn't work, like the camera (well), MMS. It's not a daily driver. But, for example, some things are better, like a lot from the NextCloud server syncs to the phone, but in Touch only the Calendar syncs.

I personally think UT is too polished(bloated) for an underpowered device like pinephone

On the contrary, UT is pretty spot on for what the pinephone hardware is. And if you find some odd things there, it's more than likely an actual bug with graphics or power management stack, than "bloat" in UT.

There's also a lot of room for performance improvement in the stack of software which makes up Lomiri, as much of it was written around Qt 5.2, and hasn't been kept up to par with improvements in upstream Qt. Many things in lomiri-ui-toolkit for example, just didn't exist back then in QtQuick, and I'm sure there's still plenty of funky assumptions throughout the code based on behavior in Qt 8 years ago.

One suggestion:

Create a forum post on the ubports subforum on pine64 and ask for help: Here and get it stickied.

Say what you are working on, and that you are looking for people to help out. Add a link to ubports forum for further communication.

I know you guys made a newspost with pine64 earlier, but not everyone reads that, and it's only "valid" for a month.

Help out the mobian or arch community with pinephone. If you put in a little effort everyday eventually youll be able to copy other peoples software and put it on ur OS of choice for everyone to enjoy.

I personally think UT is too polished(bloated) for an underpowered device like pinephone. I like UT and use as a daily driver, but just on a quicker device like my nexus 6p.