A lot happened: Glodroid is now Android 13 and supports the PinePhone Pro, new releases of Manjaro Phosh and unofficial Fedora for PinePhone, a PINE64 Community Update, your Librem 5 hopefully arriving this year, Maui 2.2.0 and more!

Commentary in italics.

Hardware available soon

Software progress

GNOME ecosystem

Plasma/Maui ecosystem

Ubuntu Touch

Sailfish OS

Nemo Mobile

Capyloon

Distributions

Non-Linux

Matrix

Kernel and other stack improvements

Android

Worth noting

Worth reading

PINE64 Community Update

  • PINE64: August update: RISC and reward. I love that Nano SIM re-design for the PinePhone Pro! (If it came to the OG PinePhone, I would totally order another one.)

A Letter of Resignation

A maybe not perfect reply to that

  • Marek Kraus for PINE64: A response to Martijn’s blog. Marek is PINE64's new community manager, since Lukasz Erecinski moved on to run the pine64eu Store. I've read this many reply many times, and I think it's better than I initially thought it is. We need to consider that Marek (Gamiee) and also others at PINE64, like TL Lim are working hard on PINE64 - I recall how burnt out Lukasz seemed back when I did PineTalk, and with more products and a growing community, I doubt the job has gotten easier since. I am sure navigaating the component shortages with only very modest price increases has also not been a particularily relaxing endeavour. Considering all this, sentences like "Differences of opinion and unwillingness to listen are two different things and cannot be equated." sound very different. I firmly believe that the most important thing, especially after this long period of not meeting in the meatspace and mostly communicating in text form (that still is not entirely over), is to - whenever possible - take a step back and remember that there are, in almost every case, well-meaning humans on the other end of the line.
  • Pine64's response to Martijn’s blog : PINE64official

Pouring gasoline in the fire

My two cents on the matter: When a contributor quits a project publicly, this creates an opportunity for the project to re-think and re-evaluate past decisions. The PINE64 model has always been to create some hardware, get feedback from the community during the process of the creation of the hardware, and then have the commmunity (which can buy the hardware essentially at cost) build software for the resulting product.
It's a model that does not work for everybody, but looking at my PinePhone, it's definitely a model that has led to some success. The involvement of the community means, that hardware changes don't happen out of the blue, that there are no massive changes from batch to batch, just because component B was way cheaper than the previously used component A (with your run of the mill Shenzhen brand, this does happen).
Martijn has done a lot for PINE64 (I don't want to know how many hours he spent doing stuff for PINE64), and quit because he felt a lack of communication, because he did not feel properly heard. And he has issues with Manjaro, which I get. Manjaro has made questionable technical choices in past and present, they aren't the best at dealing with TLS - but the sheer number of hardware partnerships they have gained shows that they are quite good at communicating and dealing with businesses; maybe because Manjaro are a business themselves. And, after all, Pine Store Ltd. is just that: A business.
Therefore, I don't expect PINE64 to drop Manjaro anytime soon (it would not magically solve all issues anyway). Instead, I hope, that PINE64 manage to distribute the weight of communicating with their community across more shoulders. Decisions need to be communicated and explained to keep the community happy. If this increases prices: Do it! Customers (people that mistake especially PINE64's non-SBC products as "normal consumer products") won't be happy without well-working communications between developer community and Pine Store. Let's all be kind to each other and work through this.

Un Poco postmarketOS

Something positive about PinePhone

Ubuntu Touch Impressions

Code hosting considerations

Important stuff

Purism

Worth listening1

The FOSS Sustainability Problem

Worth watching

Good Stuff

Dreadful Stuff

  • Chris Titus Tech: The Linux Phone. Boy, this one made me angry (my immediate reaction that focussed on how time is not measured and accurately and how it's hard to tell experiences with the PinePhone Pro apart from experiences with the PinePhone on YouTube apparently got shadow-banned). Trashing the whole ecosystem just because PinePhone Pro development is not happening fast enough and battery life is just unfair. I get dissatisfaction - but then at least be fair and title it appropriately, e.g., "The PinePhone Pro 10 months after announcement".

Community Update

Something Fun with 5G

Maemo Leste perforance improvements

PinePhone impressions

postmarketOS booting on...

Purism

Something missing?

If your project's cool story (or your awesome video or nifty blog post or ...) is missing and you don't want that to happen again, please get in touch via social media or email!

PS: In case you are wondering about the title ...

Sorry that this Update is somewhat poorly formatted and a day late.

1

I wanted to put these in, but only did so three hours after initial publication.