Well the issue with this happening in private telegram channels is that this will now turn into a "he said" "they said" situation, none of this happened publicly and neither side can provide sources. At the time the argument was definitely not that the chips weren't available.
Instead of delaying the PPP production by one day to get U-Boot sorted they decided to not ship mainline U-Boot at all. Which was only possible because Manjaro provided them with an image to ship with that.
In the end the only response there is is a blog post that never claims anything is wrong or should happen differently, after acknowledging all that I've done.
I only wrote why I left, that they themselves think they're manjaro focussed because the hardware that can't ship Linux doesn't ship manjaro doesn't change that this whole behind the scenes situation really burned me out, and I left.
You have every right to leave, and obviously if you're feeling burnt out, you made the right call for yourself. But it is frustrating that it seems like a distro preference issue has expanded into what will probably end up selling more proprietary phones at the end of the day.
I never understood why the PinePhone does not ship with Mobian or PostmarketOS instead of Manjaro. Manjaro quickly felt buggy and fragile on the first minutes I tried it, while the two others felt more robust. I'd rather see the PinePhone ship with one of these distributions.
Why does Pine64 favor Manjaro so much? What do they gain by doing so?
Personally, I don't get why the focus was on yet another mobile OS variant instead of creating a reasonably open hardware with an AOSP userland first. Users won't buy devices where they can't even be sure that basic functionality works.
And for what it's worth, I know Android isn't without its issues - but why not build something on top of at least its Linux kernel and HAL and save so much effort in getting a system running? Why do people always have to reinvent the wheel despite it being almost impossible to compete with Android and iPhone anyway, leading to burn-out and failures?
Because AOSP is controlled by Google and the incentives to develop an actually open platform are not there. Even the SDK to develop for it is guarded by a silly license.
That could have been a first step though, but at the risk of endangering the motivation to develop for mobile GNU/Linux and still be dependent of AOSP with nowhere to go when it really goes towards the wrong direction. More and more (essential) components are proprietary and shipped with the GApps. Even something as essential as the notification system relies on Google's servers and proprietary bits (this part has an open source re-implementation though, microG). At this point you need to recompile Android apps to avoid that… if you have access to the source code.
It's hard to fight against this direction, release after release, I think it is a lost battle.
I could live with AOSP today but I'd rather have a functional GNU/Linux environment with no bullshit in a few years.
It's terrible in that it's huge piles of inefficient software that can barely run on hardware that's actually pretty powerful.
It's doomed in that as time passes, different FLOSS bits of it get "deprecated" and replaced with something proprietary. Or a new API appears, but Google phones actually ship a slightly better proprietary one.
There's a big conflict of interest when an ad company wanting to spy on people and lock them in is the steward of an open source OS.
EDIT: Also, don't forget that most devices out there use a custom kernel. There's no single "AOSP".
If Pine had targeted Android AOSP, I would have had zero interest in their product. I suspect I'm not the only one. Instead, I bought their pinephone because it could run Debian.
I went from Maemo (Debian based) to AOSP Android when my n900 no longer worked. I've never experienced such a user-hostile platform as Android-- you even have to expend effort just to gain and retain root on a device you nominally own. And, I don't trust anything in the Android ecosystem to not be spying and tracking.
There's no such thing as a single AOSP kernel. If you really want to save effort in getting hardware supported, the reasonable choice is to target the kernel mainline.
Instead of delaying the PPP production by one day to get U-Boot sorted they decided to not ship mainline U-Boot at all. Which was only possible because Manjaro provided them with an image to ship with that.
In the end the only response there is is a blog post that never claims anything is wrong or should happen differently, after acknowledging all that I've done.
I only wrote why I left, that they themselves think they're manjaro focussed because the hardware that can't ship Linux doesn't ship manjaro doesn't change that this whole behind the scenes situation really burned me out, and I left.