[dbeley]

AOSP is still a google-controlled project that requires a ton of blobs, whereas the Pinephone (and other linux compatible smartphones like the Librem 5) has an entire ecosystem of healthy linux distros (from Mobian to Archlinux) running as close as possible to mainline linux.

> GrapheneOS have put huge effort into de-googling

They are doing great work but they're still depending on google for maintaining Android (Can GrapheneOS do anything against a feature pushed by Google in Android 13/14 and so on? Nope).

> Cameras work

You still lose all the post-processing stuff which account for a good portion of perceived picture quality.

[zozbot234]

The blobs are required by hardware OEMs, not by google themselves. You'd have the exact same issue when trying to run pmOS on the same hardware; it actually crops up throughout the embedded ecosystem. Pinephone and Librem 5 are quite exceptional wrt. minimizing the amounts of hardware-specific blobs that they require.

[dbeley]

Yeah indeed I should have specified that the whole "mainline linux compatible" is mostly because the Pinephone and the Librem don't use Qualcomm (or worse Mediatek) SoCs.

[MartijnBraam]

With a bit of work a lot of this can be improved, Android likes to have userspace drivers while a bunch of that stuff is also already in the kernel, so postmarketOS uses kernel drivers.