Well, using an off-the shelf system like many of the cheap smartphone companies do allow you to keep development costs down, and leverage economies of scale even for small batches.
For one, they are bringing up a stack that's quite different from the one usually found on smartphones, which sounds quite costly.
From the security point of view, I am not sure it would be less secure on the sw side, but it would be less open. On the hw side, they have kill switches, isolated the firmware on ROM chips (RYF-compliant), and have a pretty strict security-first approach.
Unfortunately that places it out of reach for me, financially-speaking. I'll continue with postmarketos, and keep an eye on the pinephone.
For one, they are bringing up a stack that's quite different from the one usually found on smartphones, which sounds quite costly.
From the security point of view, I am not sure it would be less secure on the sw side, but it would be less open. On the hw side, they have kill switches, isolated the firmware on ROM chips (RYF-compliant), and have a pretty strict security-first approach.
Unfortunately that places it out of reach for me, financially-speaking. I'll continue with postmarketos, and keep an eye on the pinephone.