Picked up a PinePhone a few months ago but didn't get a chance to really play around with it until the last week or so. It shipped with postmarketOS which I played around with, but I had some issues pulling down software from the distro's repos even after manually updating to the current version of it, and distro hopped over to Mobian since I'm more familiar with Debian, and it rules. I never thought I'd see a real commercial phone running Linux outside of some limited run novelty phone or an Android environment running X11. Apps are mostly responsive, and the shipped apps are (mostly) very touch screen friendly. The coolest part of this for me is you can use a USB C hub on the PinePhone to connect this phone up to a real screen and keyboard, like you can on some Android phones, but it's a real Linux desktop and not an approximation of one.
I'm going to pick up a pay as you go SIM card to toss into this thing and see if I can use it as more of a real phone rather than just a wifi device sometime this week.
Definitely still getting there, it's a little buggy and sluggish, part of that might be the hardware of the phone and part of that might just be unoptimized software. More than 2 tabs in Firefox ESR seems to slow the device to a crawl, the terminal is difficult to copy/paste in which sucks ass for me since I use password store for my password manager on my home server and it's difficult as shit to get my passwords, and a lot of apps available for download are unoptimized for touch screens, but both postmarketOS and Mobian are tracking apps that work and work well on their respective wikis so I've been using that to find apps to test (and while they might not be phone apps, they'll work fine once you plug the phone into the desktop setup -- it's a real computer!). For me personally, myself and most of my friends, family, and comrades are on Signal so without a native app for it that works well I won't be able to move over fully. Not bad though for a phone that's $200 brand new and unlocked.
Supposedly postmarket and Mobian (and probably some of the other distros like Manjaro) have recently worked out some of the big blockers for using it as a phone like not waking the device up when a phone call occurs so it might just be functional for a phone!
Is it possible to make it a web app so you don't have to use it in a browser?
For Hexbear? I haven't tried, but since this is the desktop version of Firefox with some small tweaks and patches for a touch screen so it should work. Not sure how long we'll be able to do that though since Mozilla seems to be deprecating the feature on desktop unless I misread what their intent of this is https://www.fastcompany.com/90597411/mozilla-firefox-no-ssb-pwa-support
I meant outside of firefox since yeah they got rid of PWA support on desktop firefox, which was really sad.
Ah, yeah haven't tried it. It comes with Firefox ESR and I haven't even bothered upgrading it to the current stable branch let alone put another browser on here. Mobian's wiki says GNOME web works well on the touch screen, but I'm not sure if it has the PWA feature. I know Chromium does but based on the wiki page it looks like it needs a lot of work to run well on the phone.
Moxie has historically been hostile to any third party clients or anything he didn't come up with himself, but hoping something comes out that works well! 🤞 🤞 🤞
If you want to try it out and have an old phone sitting around, you might be able to throw postmarketOS on it and get the same experience! They have a dozen devices or so that are in varying states of usable, and a lot more that you can boot or do limited things on it. I threw it on my N900 and it works pretty well.