I bought two Pinephones early on -- the second because I figured my original one, a developer early-release device, must have been faulty -- and frankly they were paperweights the day they shipped. I tried several different OSes on them and they were all more or less unusable, and the camera support was and continued to be garbage.

I had high hopes for the project, but over the course of years it still never turned into something that even an open source masochist like myself could really consider a daily driver. Phone calls, a halfway responsive browser, and a camera that's no worse than a 2008 Razr and I'd be happy... too bad!

I agree that the device was a disappointment. I was hoping it would be a revival of the Nokia N900 spirit, but the poor battery life, the lack of a decent hardware keyboard at launch, plus a change in the FOSS development culture, just meant that it never attracted that critical mass of hackers.

The unresponsiveness of the browser seems all down to the very underpowerered A64 processor plus slow memory. With those hardware constraints, I'm not sure the community could have come up with any solution.

IMO, the PinePhone never had the specs to be a good daily driver. The Pro is closer but still not quite there.

That said, there's plenty of other things that could be used for: a wall mounted control panel for your smart home, retro game console, security camera, asset tracker, etc.

Don't just leave them to rot in a drawer forever - put them up on ebay (or craigslist or r/hardwareswap, or whatever)!

If that became the expectation or legislation, I'd expect you'd see a lot more "officially not end of life, but no recent updates have been pushed".