... to be possible with some out-of-band debug cable, etc. but just not nearly as much of one and I doubt they care about going out of the way to prevent that as they do with stopping updates via the OS. This is not the only issue with it. It is one of them, and representative
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of the other issues with the device and why it is the way it is despite being quite expensive. So, yeah, the Pinephone is very low end hardware, and you get what you would expect for the price, including problematic hardware / firmware security, but future ones can be better.
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They aren't explicitly anti-security and making design decisions based on stuff like that. Rather it's largely based on price. I think you are better off with that especially with the potential of future versions with higher end, more modern hardware. They won't sabotage it.
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I don't expect them to set up security features for the SoC, setting up all the peripherals in a secure way, etc. and it can be problematic because public tools are generally not available to do stuff like flashing fuses in the SoC, even if it's still in development mode.
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But they are not going to sabotage it, and they probably just leave it in the development mode, so perhaps you could theoretically set up various security features on it. They haven't gone out of the way to block you from doing that and to block you updating firmware/microcode.
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So, would you rather have bottom of the barrel, very cheap hardware without the OEM doing higher level security integration work, or essentially all those problems along with explicit sabotaging of security and the ability to build something a bit more secure with it as a base.
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Or you know, you could always just use the mainline kernel drivers and software stack on a mainstream phone without this issues and that's popular enough among developers to have steady work on it including from Linaro, etc. Don't see why you settle on these 2 platforms only.
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There is nothing more open about the components they're using, and you could be using open drivers on other hardware too. It's not going to be great either way and there will be missing functionality, stability issues, etc. You just seem to be going entirely based on marketing.
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So yeah, that's what these devices are marketed / purported to be good at, and the Pinephone has a genuine use case / niche if you want really cheap hardware as opposed to needing some popular flagship phone with a development community, along with pretty sane marketing and not
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manipulating / taking advantages of projects / people for marketing purposes among other slimy things. I don't see much wrong with Pine64 as a company or their products when considering that it's explicitly supposed to be really cheap and therefore has flaws tied to that.
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Nothing wrong with cheap development / hobbyist boards and devices that are not pretending to be something they're not and are just not focused on security. You can put a lot of effort into papering over some of the issues especially if you obtain SoC tooling for setting it up.