For enthusiasts, it is literally an existing phone slapped on an XDA logo and LineageOS.
If it wants to legally ship with GMS, it still needs to pass CTS, and you still cannot root without breaking SafetyNet.
Might as well just buy any popular phone and flash any custom ROM.
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For developers, this is no different than any other smartphone, maybe even worse than Pixels.
If this phone is for developers, I'd expect almost everything, including the bootloader, to be open source so people can *really* mess around with it.
Look at PinePhone, not this one.
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So yeah, unless you are a diehard XDA fanboy which drolls over the XDA logo when you look at the back of the phone, I cannot see any reason why anyone should buy one.
Let me know your thoughts though, I'd love to know the reasons why you would disagree 😉
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Replying to
You're forgetting privacy enthusiasts who do not want to mess with their device and want to have a google free phone with a keyboard out of the box.
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Both Copperhead and Graphene have very limited hardware support, plus a number of organisational limitations. I've been using e.foundation ROMs for over a year and like it quite a lot.
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Graphene OS is painfully slow even on “good hardware”
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GrapheneOS is a project focused on privacy and security hardening and ships features with a performance cost like github.com/GrapheneOS/har and a more secure spawning model (grapheneos.org/usage#exec-spa). It's hardly painfully slow, and hardening is the whole purpose behind the project.
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Also, worth noting that despite a lot of apparent confusion about it, microG is primarily an implementation of Google services. Aside from the supplementary network location options, it's an alternative implementation of a small subset of the client-side APIs for Google services.
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It lags behind major OS upgrades, the development of Play services API and the widespread adoption of APIs by apps. It's certainly useful, but it's always going to be problematic. It holds back upgrades for OSes including it and apps relying on it are prone to breaking.
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There are also implementation issues, but what's important are the conceptual problems with chasing after Play services.
Hopefully, the anti-competitive approach Google takes with the implementation of their cloud services on Android will be addressed by anti-trust cases.
We don't see a way to provide a production-quality OS depending on hacking together an incomplete reverse engineered implementation of Google service clients.
We also want to be part of a movement pushing developers to support generic Android not just Android with Play services.
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