Sadly (as much of a cynic as this makes me seem) I kinda figured this is exactly what would happen when the Pine people decided to partner/use MediaTek or name any other vendor who doesn't truly embrace or care about open-source. I'd spotlight Chinese SoC vendors here but that's biased, Qualcomm's track record isn't awesome here either, but it's my understanding people inside ARE trying to change that culture.
My high-level observation is the Pine people are basically selling what's effectively a "reference design" built around some questionable hardware under the guise of making an open-source hardware/phone/etc. Whether or not the device actually works as a phone, has good battery life, works reliably is kind of a secondary goal and ends up mostly resting on the shoulders of a community of unpaid software developers.
People here might be too young to remember, but there was a prior attempt at an open-phone called "OpenMoko". Despite using silicon that was more open-source friendy, it didn't really work out. It's REALLY challenging to build custom hardware, get the details right and build it on open-source software unless you're super well funded and very coordinated.
It's however not hard to sell "kits" that give you the idea they'll do something but end up tricking the end-user who doesn't find out until after the money is spent.
MediaTek has gotten much better. Yeah, my mt7621u wifi craps out a couple times a day and has to be usbreset. But in general, I think MediaTek and Qualcomm are both at B- and moving in the right direction.
This is one market, not a total picture, but looking at what OpenWRT supports is some kind of indicator. MediaTek really showed up in force for Wifi 6. Very very few 802.11ax systems were hackable, try as we might. But a bunch of very affordable pretty well performing MediaTek access points showed up early, & only more and more have been made available since.
I wish I had a real source of real information on what's forcing the bad old dirty shitty don't give a fuck world to reform into people who actually want their chips to be usable, who appreciate that having your shit upstreamed into mainline is the only way your crap isn't immediately rotting on the vine from day 0. Google's Chromebooks seemed to have had some influence, created a uniquely strong pressure to do the right thing; MediaTek seems like they've kind of had to pass the gauntlet on this, & become something more than they might have otherwise been. One of the best act's Google's ever done, having a Chromebook team that has driven hard for getting the heck out of vendor hell. Meanwhile, the Android team has the Google Kernel Image, excuse me, Generic Kernel Image (Generic Google Kernel Image at best!) to specifically enable everyone to never have to upstream their support ever again, from what it looks like (because Google will maintain a userland driver layer hitting Google APIs so folks can just ignore actual kernel support forever).
Same. I was using SailfishOS on Xperia devices and also Ubuntu Touch.
I found SailfishOS UI to be pretty bizarre and for using compiled software (Qt) the UI was oddly laggy. Basic things like attaching photos when sending an MMS were bizarre, you had to do it one at a time from the gallery app, etc.
Ubuntu Touch has a pretty reasonable UI (aside from having a start-bar like thing that you swipe in and out) but they do NOT support VoLTE at the moment which means you can't use it as a phone! Performance on Ubuntu Touch was also pretty bad even on decent hardware and while it's improved on Pixel-era devices you'd think all UI interactions would be instaneous.
Both projects seem to have made some strane prioritizations. Sailfish seems to have pointless re-invented their own UI paradigms, their own browser, etc and Ubuntu Touch doesn't seem to care the devices can't be used as phones given lack of VoLTE but they have Snaps and their own web browser...
I have an Aquaris BQ 4.5 Ubuntu phone and it's my absolute favourite smartphone I've owned (compared to a couple middle market Sony phones, Nexus 5, Nexus 5X, and my current Sony Xperia XA2 Ultra, which is way too friggin ginormous, it's as big as my hand). The dimensions are perfect for me and I really like the Ubuntu Touch OS.
Unfortunately I managed to drop it and now the screen has a dead spot in the bottom left. As that is the spot where the important icons are it means I have a device that works perfectly aside from being entirely useless (a device which resembles its owner perfectly).
You're right on the QML ; I'll admit I didn't look super hard, I was under the impression QML eventually compiled down but maybe there's some interpreter-type event loop implementation that results in a slower than expected UI.
Based on this Stackover flow post I guess it CAN be compiled but that depends on the version, open-source, commercial, etc:
JMP.chat exists but honestly that's kind of a crutch or work around if your primary cell phone can't make or receive calls on its own without ANOTHER broker or provider.
One thing I did like about Sailfish OS and to a lesser extent Ubuntu is that it's mostly "standard" Linux under the hood so you can do things like run dnsmasq or something like that and tweak it as needed.
But in this day and age I think the bare minimum for a cell phone is calling, texting (SMS), possibly MMS and GPS/maps that don't need a network or Internet connection. I'm hoping PostmarketOS, Sailfish, Ubuntu Touch, open-source-smart-phone will get there but I'm not holding my breath.
I heard rumours that the new nokia 3310 5g which will be released in may will run sailfish os. Will be interesting to see if it is true, if it will be the same mess that kaios was on the nokia 8000 or if it will actually work well.
My high-level observation is the Pine people are basically selling what's effectively a "reference design" built around some questionable hardware under the guise of making an open-source hardware/phone/etc. Whether or not the device actually works as a phone, has good battery life, works reliably is kind of a secondary goal and ends up mostly resting on the shoulders of a community of unpaid software developers.
People here might be too young to remember, but there was a prior attempt at an open-phone called "OpenMoko". Despite using silicon that was more open-source friendy, it didn't really work out. It's REALLY challenging to build custom hardware, get the details right and build it on open-source software unless you're super well funded and very coordinated.
It's however not hard to sell "kits" that give you the idea they'll do something but end up tricking the end-user who doesn't find out until after the money is spent.