It's 2026... but what do we make of this 2025 now? Here's my haphazard, rushed attempt to try to sum 2025 up.

Instead of going through month by month, I figured it would be better to go topic by topic.

Hardware (enablement)

Phone Projects

Let's tackle the hardware projects first, in alphabetical order.

dawndrums (new!)

dawndrums is a hardware project from Tunesia that surfaced this year. They are iterating on a RK3588s-powered phone design, first detailed here. In late November, they presented their Rev 1.1 design and published a short video (see also Liliputing). One to watch in 2026!

FuriLabs

FuriLabs, who started out in 2024, were happy when they had sold their first batch at/around FOSDEM, but then they ran into a bit of a snag: They could not get more FLX1 made. Thus they announced the FLX1s in September, a custom design with a different hardware partner, which did not make everyone happy as it is a bit of a "side-grade": It features more RAM, hardware kill-switches, but a less high-res camera, less water-proofing and a lower-res screen in a smaller, thinner package - and it's shipping in late December. I have not found a review yet, but its good to see that they are back to 'normal operations' again.

Jolla

Jolla, after reforming without Russian capital as JollyBoys in 2024, had launched the Jolla C2 in a partnership with turkish Reeder - a low-end, UniSoc-powered 4G smartphone, that Sailfish OS 5.0 launched on first on, launched a crowd-funder for a proper 5G Jolla device in late 2025. That crowd-funding worked well, likely beyond what Jolla expected, and by now, it's clear that it will be powered by Mediatek Dimensity 7000 series chipset. It's still unclear whether they will manage to hit 10000 pre-orders, to unlock a "The Other Half" feature similar to the original Jolla 1 Phone.

What's also nice is the close-to-mainline kernel support for the Jolla C2 enabled by Affe Null, which can be used with SailfishOS or postmarketOS. I am really looking forward to Affe Null's FOSDEM talk!

Liberux

Liberux is the second 2025 new-comer phone with a Rockchip RK3588s chip. Unlike dawndrums, they already went for a crowdfunder this summer, and ... unfortunately failed. In late November however, they announced that they will move-forward with new self-funding.

PINE64

PINE64 did not add to their phone device portfolio, they reduced it. The PinePhone Pro, which never managed to get enough community attention to make it as reliable as the PinePhone, was discontinued.

They do, however, keep selling the OG PinePhone, which, being hardware-(MALI 400)-limited to OpenGL ES 2.0 no longer fulfills the requirements of many GUI frameworks, can't be recommended anymore either. Don't buy a PinePhone in 2026, please.

Purism

No new devices from Purism either. It's good to see that they continued PureOS developement for the Librem 5/Liberty Phone though, and Crimson (the equivalent of Debian 12 Bookworm) is pretty much ready and there's hope that Dawn (~ Trixie) will not take as long. It would be nice to see some hardware-refresh (-announcment) in 2026

Hardware enablement

Since this is mostly a mainline-topic, and there are so many devices, it's almost impossible to make a proper list. I personally particularily enjoyed camera progress like focus drivers for the OnePlus 6, but of course there's so much more. Yes, it's not like there's nothing left to do in 2026, but progress has certainly been made.

Distributions/OS progress

Droidian

Droidian moved to Debian Forky and released Droidian 101 landed in September. It's good to see Droidian continue despite the contributor loss to FuriLabs.

Maemo Leste

Maemo Leste is now based on Devuan Daedalus (Debian Bookworm), and Qt6 support was added, apps were improved - I just wonder how the end of pre-VoLTE will affect the project, that's finally close to a long chased goal, as the only supported 4G capable device is the PinePhone.

Mobian

Mobian made the jump to Trixie this year, and Pixel 3a (XL) support has matured. It seems like they are just chugging along well :-)

Nemo Mobile

Nemo Mobile are also still around. The Qt6 porting effort has moved forward, and, due to Manjaro shipping "some outdated components, such as Meson, GObject Introspection, Mesa, and others" they are now moving to openSUSE, which makes a lot of sense, especially remembering Nemo Mobile's Mer history. For details, please read their fresh Nemomobile 2025 June to December blog post.

PocketBlue

A new contender: Pocketblue is " a project which provides Fedora Atomic images for mobile devices". It supports two Xiaomi tablets and the OnePlus 6 and OnePlus 6t. I've briefly given it a try (without a SIM card on my spare OnePlus 6 with Plasma Mobile, and was positively impressed.

postmarketOS

postmarketOS have been going strong in 2025, as they have successfully added systemd. I could try to some up all the little things that happened, but ... there's been so much movement, just check their blog. My personal highlights include mobile-config-thunderbird, ending my quest to find an email client that did what i wanted without too much setup.

Unfortunately, not all changes immediately improve user experience or make daily driving easier - big changes can even break some edge (use stable, please!) installations. That said, the base appears more solid now, systemd musl support is upstream and Alpine carries some systemd-subpackages, and with things like immutability coming in 2026, we just need the magical device that has only Y and no N or P.

Sailfish OS

SailfishOS 5 was released in February 2025 and received multiple updates since.

Regarding apps, I don't follow Sailfish OS that closely and have not played with my Sailfish OS devices in a bit. It's also hard to follow, as there's the Jolla Store, OpenRepos.net and Chum, plus a number of additional repos. While I was delighted to hear on the fediverse, that Qt6 builds of KDE apps do run - mainly for [Angelfish], which is definitely more current than Sailfish's native, Gecko-powered web browser that's still on a two-digit Firefox ESR release, these newer builds have not landed in Chum yet.

Ubuntu Touch 24.04

After Ubuntu Touch 20.04 had been released in late March 2023, 24.04 based Ubuntu Touch was released on September 30th, 2025, catching up to the still current Ubuntu LTS release. Aside from a different release (naming) model (no more "OTA x"), which is why we're now at 24.04 1.1, native Snap integration and overall newer packages are a welcome change. Also, app development appears to have picked up: many of the recent bi-weekly Ubuntu Touch Q&A's had a long list of new or revived apps to go through.

Mobile Desktops/Shells

Flick

This contender is nothing for the AI-opposed: It has two contributors, and Claude, steered by a former Purism marketing employee and content creator (aka the other contributor. The README reaks of this, quote "X11/XWayland apps do not work (Firefox, etc.) " - when Firefox actually uses Wayland by default since late 2023/121.0, but again, I have not checked it out and the video shows some progress.

GNOME Shell Mobile

GNOME Shell Mobile was updated to 48, with a number of improvements. Well done!

Lomiri

Lomiri, as part of Ubuntu Touch, has already been discussed. It's available in postmarketOS, and also in Debian, and more importantly, work has been started on a Qt6 port of Lomiri, and on an xdg-desktop-portal-lomiri.

Marathon Shell

Another newcomer is Marathon Shell. I have yet to check it out, but this short video demo certainly looks promising.

Phosh

And finally a well-known, well-trusted player: Phosh has kept maturing, as, 9 releases in 2025 prove. A support structure has been established - and since donations at the beginning of years count too, now is a good time to support Phosh. That's enough from me, make sure to read their 2025 in Retrospect post for more :-)

The outlook is positive, too, as work on cutout support and Phosh’s port to GTK4 has been funded by NLnet.

Plasma Mobile

Plasma Mobile has also been moving forward, as documented on their blog. To me, the most welcome change was the new and improved Plasma Camera, it now has a libcamera backend, and, to be honest, is a nice addition whether you are using Plasma Mobile or not.

Sxmo

Sxmo has seen another release, adding support for additonal window manages (i3 and River). Call audio improvements have landed, and more devices are supported. Looks like 2025 has been a good year for Sxmo.

LINMOB.net

If only money could buy me time, there's a lot I would have liked to publish,... but then, it's all about priorities. I can only spend my time once, and a minute spent on mobile-config-firefox or LinuxPhoneApps.org or bumping some flatpak runtimes or improving app metadata, can't be spent again on this project.

The "non-weekly-update" posts of 2025 are few, and the only one in the second half of the year (and that one is a guest post):

I am just glad that I managed to produce Weekly Updates pretty consistently.

Summing up

Overall, I'd say it's been a good year across the board; although the last two months certainly helped with coming to this conclusion, and I look forward to 2026 - where this blog will be more open to your contribution (content) than ever, to spoil one thing.

If you think I missed something, please leave a comment on the fediverse or send an email! Happy New Year, everybody!