> I don't know many people who care about the hardware except for the camera. These phones are not for many people. > How is it? In development. The pinephon

> I don't know many people who care about the hardware except for the camera. These phones are not for many people. > How is it? In development. The pinephone can take still shots. The Librem 5’s camera isn’t functional yet AFAIK. > Can it compete with the current phones from Apple and Google? No. It’s not playing the same game. I would pay money not to have one of those. > Does it do all the standard things like include filters, portrait mode, night mode, etc...? AFAIK, no. > Can I search for "dog" and get all my dog photos or search for a city and get all the photos taken there? I don’t know of any apps for them that do that at the moment. > And how's the app store? When some random game goes viral and I want to play with my friends, am I going to be able to? Probably not. It probably has about 6 orders of magnitude fewer users, and 5–6 orders fewer devs. You can virtualize Android, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a much worse experience than Proton on desktop (it doesn’t have Valve behind it. Anti-cheat might get you banned). > Are the apps vetted for security and safety? Yes, in some repos. Most of the distros will let you use Debian’s, which IIUC have had z-e-r-o zero malware (not counting systemd ;)) in their decades-long history. > Does it integrate with my car? One of the primary uses of my phone is for navigation. Being able to plug it into my car and say "navigate to 123 main street" as I drive is pretty key. I’m confused why it needs to integrate with you car to give directions. Do you mean connect with Bluetooth to use your speakers? > Is their store only online? Yep. > If they don't have their own retailers can I at least see them at a carrier store or BestBuy? Nope. > Will Verizon activate the phone on their network? A decade ago they wouldn't approve the Nexus 7 tablet, so this is something I think about. Nope, not as far as my crystal ball can see. The pine wiki says you can activate a SIM on a burner phone and swap it into the pinephone, and Verizon shouldn’t care.