Ghosted with no refund for phone - do not trust this company!

Hardware Librem 5
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customers who ordered between ~December 2020 and June 2021 have a legitimate complaint.
I ordered in (I ordered in January 21, at that time the website said the order would be delivered in a few months, it said “order now” not back order, or pre-order. - they changed the site only in the summer last year.
At that time it was a released product, that they’d sent to reviewers to show it was a real working device that people could actually get. and they were advertising that it would be in your hands in a few months. - a long time later it is not. - Purism promised a product that they knew they wouldn’t be able to get.
And, no, the pandemic isn’t really a great excuse for a company making these promises to deliver a product in the middle of the product almost a full year after manufacturing had started shutting down.

It’s a vastly different situation compared to backers who, looked at a project, thought they might like the outcome and decided that they could afford to gamble money for a potential product.
the gambler was always aware that there was no fixed date, they might not get a product, and anything they get is a reward for their investment, if the project goes to plan.
the consumer bought a product that they were told was complete and ready.

With the greatest respect to those who wanted to back a project and take a gamble that a company might be able to produce a Linux phone, and might be able to make it commercially viable.
Some of us gave money on rather different terms. We weren’t gamblers, or angels, or backers. - we were consumers and customers. and customers money has been used to meet reward unsecure orders.

The flip side of that is really that nobody benefits if your don’t call out and make an example out of shady business practices. - it’s only a loss if there isn’t a better/more ethical company that could take the place in the market.

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Everything on the topic is already said. You are not convincing anybody. There is no alternative on the market and neither you nor other people who complain offer one.
You are also ignoring the fact that there is a survivor bias. We see the companies that live to show good customer service or good delivery, but we don’t see the many companies that went bankrupt with delivering less than Purism and spending the customer’s money in the process.
Every transaction in our World has a risk attached to it. And out of experience we underestimate the risks instead of understanding their existence.

Yes, Purism is not perfect.
But it is for at least some people better than the Google+Apple+Made In China alternatives.

When I was on the look for Linux smartphones I came upon Fxtec Pro1x. It was a particularly attractive device for me because I had a Nokia E7 in the past and the Pro1x uses the same construction.
You think that their customers had a significantly better experience with the delivery?
Have a look:

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When has that ever made any difference? :wink:

Topics just live on, pointlessly.

It was “fun” reading the link you provided. Some eerie similarities. That’s life.

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Pine phone - Linux phone, privacy switches. available to order, actually delivering, cleared their backlogs. don’t seem to have these huge delivery issues that Purism have…

now I’ve mentioned just one viable alternative (found with very little research) would it be OK with you if people actually stand up for their rights as a consumer?

You are ignoring the mechanisms through which those companies survived whilst others failed! You know why those companies survive? - because they act in a fashion that pleases their customers. they get repeat business, they get business from recommendation… ability to use the product aside. - is purism the kind of company that you would point your friends or family to? is it the kind of company you’d want to associate yourself with to recommend to others?
– and if it’s not something that you’d recommend to your family think why is that? is it really because your brother/sister/mother/father wouldn’t know how to to work a linux based phone, or because you’d be frankly embarrassed to keep having to have the same conversations about when they might get the device each time you saw them?

and… (sad that I’m having to slow walk you through this…) we manage that risk by punishing bad business practices with fines etc. such that the bad companies fail, and what is left is the companies that do act in good ways… which lowers the risk profile in the market… making it safer for all.

Additionally, purism manufacture their devices in china. So the “made in China” criticism does not really hold water either.

I will reiterate what I said.
Nobody benefits if you don’t call out shady business practices. - this is because bad business are allowed to flourish, and gain effective monopolies, or crowd the market, that they compete in, and they have an unfair advantage as (usually) acting in a manner that is ethical is more expensive.
-the example here is, (I assume) purism clearly have cash flow issues, (and this is why they want to keep your cash until they have got more cash from the next sale., the money that you spent on your phone has been spent long ago. - which is fine because you backed a project knowing you would have the possibility to loose your money.
The OP however didn’t back a project they bought a good. - and there is a strong difference there. - the fact that Purism are choosing to reward investors before fulfilling orders (that were promised “in a few months”) is an example of a bad business practice.

it is only a loss if there isn’t a better company to take their place - this speaks to what you are saying “there isn’t a better company out there” - BUT… as I already pointed out, that’s not true - there are Linux phone competitors out there.

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Librem 5 has a made in the USA version.

PinePhone has no made in the USA version.
Honestly for me the main reason why I have not ordered Librem Mini or Librem 14 yet is that there is a no Librem Mini USA or Librem 14 USA versions.

PinePhone has a hardware that is so week that it is close to unusable.
PinePhonePro is currently very far from being a market ready product. Librem 5 is often criticized for being still in “Beta”-Testing. PinePhonePro is even further away. And it has no “made outside of PRC” version.

Librem 5 has many great design choices that has been made by the development team that I really like. For example that the frame is acting like a huge heat sink, the passthrough power supply, the smart card reader, the exchangeable modem and wifi cards. I have a Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB of RAM and honestly the Librem 5 works better for me even though in theory the specs of the RPi4 are better. This is result of the better design and wise choices on the important spots (for example better GPU and better WiFi of the L5 compared to the RPi4).
It is the best product on the market for my personal subjective taste, needs and priorities. I wish that the future version will have a micro HDMI so that we don’t need to fight through the difficult topic of docking station compatibility (while keeping the USB-C available for the power supply).

You can have other priorities and you can have products that fit you better.
For many people PinePhone is not an option. For me it isn’t.

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A small example:

Tesla has just $9 million on hand and is in jeopardy of not being able to deliver Roadsters to customers who already paid as much as $109,000 for them. The company secures $40 million in funding from investors by issuing convertible debt to help it avoid bankruptcy and meet production goals.

Tesla’s history: From The Roadster to SEC problems - CNN.com

And btw. for the second generation of the Roadster, there are also issues:
2017 they started gathering 50.000 USD deposits for a car that should have been on the road 2020. It is 2022 and we have no Tesla Roadster 2020 yet. :wink:

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I just came across this one: https://skysedge.com/unsmartphones/RUSP/index.html Much cheaper too. Has a physical on/off switch and a physical microphone on/off switch. Makes calls. I like it.

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The PinePhone and PinePhone Pro are the only other truly Linux phones that you can buy with Linux preinstalled, since the rest use Android kernels and then run the rest of the Linux stack on top of libhybris. If you buy a “Linux” phone from Volla Phone, F(x)tec, jolla-devices.com or Planet Computers, you are getting an Android kernel that will probably never be upgraded, and it won’t get security updates after a couple years when Qualcomm, Mediatek or Google decide to stop providing security updates for it. In addition, you will get a bunch of proprietary blobs that you can’t audit or upgrade, because the manufacturer only supports them for a couple years. In other words, you will probably junk the phone in a couple years, because it can’t be upgraded and will likely become a security risk.

Yes, you can install PostmarketOS with a Linux kernel on some Android phones, but even if you have a phone with a Snapdragon 845, which has the best mainline Linux support of any of the mobile SoC’s, you will only get a half functional phone with major components on the phone not working.

If you buy the F(x)tec Pro1 X, you may never get your phone. If you buy the Volla Phone, Volla Phone X or F(x)tec Pro1 X with Ubuntu Touch, you are getting an operating system which doesn’t have enough volunteers to properly maintain the code. Over the last year, I can only find 25 commits to the core software (24 commits for Lomiri and 1 commit for Ubuntu Touch), whereas all the rest of the dev work is for installing Ubuntu Touch on different devices and configuration (153 commits for ubports-installer and 116 commits for ubports-configs). Yes, the Volla Phone did get the OTA-15 through OTA-23 updates, but as far as I can tell, there is almost no work being done on Ubuntu Touch itself, so you are relying on unmaintained code.

If you buy the Planet Computers Gemini and install Debian on your own, you will be stuck with Debian 9 stretch with no possibility to upgrade to a later version of Debian. If you bought the Planet Computers Cosmo and installed Debian on your own, then your last update was 17 months ago with this lovely note:

28/04/2021 - The latest Linux Debian firmware v4 is now available!
Please note we are investigating an issue related to not receiving incoming calls with this version of Linux.

As far as I can tell, Planet Computers has now given up on Linux, since there is no Debian port for the new Astro.

If you buy a Sony Xperia with a postmarket install of Sailfish OS by jolla-devices.com (which isn’t the same company as Jolla), then you are getting no tech support for the software except for what you can find on the Sailfish OS community forums (although jolla-devices.com does claim to supply a 1 year hardware warranty for the device) and it only offers devices for the European market. Unlike Ubuntu Touch, Sailfish OS is well maintained, but it relies on some code such as oFono and ConnMan which aren’t nearly as well maintained as ModemManager and NetworkManager used by PureOS and most standard Linux distros. Jolla actually does a decent job of providing updates for Xperias, but as far as I can tell, you will get no kernel upgrades.

If you want a real Linux kernel that you can upgrade and will have long-term support, your only option besides the Librem 5 are the PinePhone and PinePhone Pro. The PinePhone Pro has “critical bugs” in U-boot and its SPI memory code is “unfinished” according the PINE64 wiki, so you are going to have problems booting it. With the PinePhone and PinePhone Pro you get a 30 day hardware warranty and basically no support for the software other than what you can find on the forums.

The PinePhone is fun to tinker with in my experience, but it is slow and laggy compared to the Librem 5 due to poor RAM, eMMC and graphics performance. (See my benchmarks). There is no place to file bug reports with PINE64 about its hardware, and I was unable to get PINE64 to fix the errors that I found in the PinePhone schematics. Despite having shipped over 60k PinePhones, PINE64 has never fixed their hardware design to address the screen backlight flicker due to communication on an I2C bus and slow eMMC speed.

The major problem, however, is that Purism is the ONLY company selling a Linux phone which is doing any software development, which is critical for making mobile Linux good enough to become a usable system. According to PINE64’s poll of PinePhone users, the most popular interface is Phosh, which was developed by Purism, so many of the PinePhone sales depend on dev work being done by Purism.

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If Purism ceases to exist, then the only companies paying for development are Jolla (which develops Sailfish OS, but has no licensed hardware sellers) and Blue Systems (which pays a few developers to work part time on Plasma Mobile). In other words, buying a Linux phone from another company does nothing to actually develop mobile Linux, so we have to rely on 100% volunteer labor, which means slow and spotty dev work. A good example of what happens with volunteer labor is that critical kernel code for the PinePhone has never been submitted to mainline Linux, so the phones will have to keep using custom kernels.

The critical thing is that no company is going to arise to take Purism’s place if the company fails, because many tech companies before Purism tried to pay the high costs of developing mobile Linux and they lost millions of dollars and gave up in failure. Jolla has managed to get out of bankruptcy and limp along for many years, but Sailfish OS will never be adopted by the community due to its proprietary Silica interface. Samsung has given up on Tizen as a mobile OS now that its watches are switching to Android. LG stopped working on WebOS as a mobile OS years ago, since it is only focused on using it in TVs and refrigerators. I doubt that Nemo Mobile will ever become a usable interface, and Ubuntu Touch’s Lomiri simply doesn’t have the volunteers to maintain its code.

Our only real choices are Plasma Mobile, Sxmo and Phosh, because those are the only FOSS mobile Linux interfaces getting real dev work. Sxmo will only ever appeal to a small crowd of geeks, so I don’t see it as a viable option for most people. Plasma Mobile has been in development since July 2015, but it is considered by most people to be less usable than Phosh, which started its development in January 2018, which indicates the speed that mobile Linux will develop with 100% volunteer dev work. If the goal is to create a viable alternative to the Android/iOS duopoly, we need paid development of software that works with one of the two existing ecosystems (GNOME or KDE) so it doesn’t become siloed and eventually abandoned.

As I see it, supporting Purism is the best path available to actually getting functional mobile Linux. I don’t care for some of Purism’s marketing and I especially disagree with how Purism retroactively changed its refund policy, but I have decided to support the company because of its open development and willingness to work collaboratively with the larger GTK/GNOME community. I have dealt with a number of tech companies over the years, and I have never seen a company where it is so easy to interact directly with developers and they will go out of their way to answer my questions.

If Purism disappears, it is extremely unlikely that another company will arise to take its place, because it is not rational to invest in mobile Linux development after witnessing the business failures of mobile Linux at Sharp, Motorola, Nokia, Intel, FIC/OpenMoko, Wind River, MonteVista, Azingo, Samsung, Palm->HP, Mozilla, Arcadine, Canonical and arguably Jolla. Our realistic choices are either supporting Purism or accepting volunteer development of mobile Linux, which means that mobile Linux will be largely unusable by ordinary people for a long time. It is simply not realistic to dream that another company with better financing will magically arise and dump millions into mobile Linux development, like Purism has done.

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“The society will lose if the project fails”.

This is so wrong. A company as dishonest as Purism being allowed to get away with their misconduct is what results in moral hazard, everyone getting the message that the way to behave is to screw people, take their money, spend it and deliver nothing, and nothing will happen to you. That’s how “the society loses” - by descending into a lawless banana republic where everyone just cheats their customers, rather than a society of honest dealings.

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Obviously it has not been repeated often enough. Purism, like flypaper full of flies continues to catch and kill flies, continues to attract ever more innocent people and keeps ripping them off their money. That’s why we keep getting these posts complaining about the same thing, from new people who have paid for a phone years after it has become known that Purism is a scam which just takes people’s money and never delivers anything. It’s time for this company to be shut down, so it can stop scamming ever more people.

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Did you happen to notice that Sky’s Edge explicitly calls your order for its Un-Smartphone a “pre-order” and doesn’t say anything on its web site or forum about refunds or canceling your order. It originally promised to ship the phone in Spring 2021, but is now promising to ship the phone in Spring 2023. It looks like a cool open source project and I hope that it succeeds, but it seems bizarre to recommend the Un-Smartphone over the Librem 5, if you are concerned that the company won’t repay refunds immediately and won’t ship in a timely manner.

Yes, this is definitely a “scam”:

$ python3 locPurism.py 
Lines of code in Purism's projects for the Librem 5:
	libhandy: 48038
	libadwaita: 73669
	calls: 28974
	chatty: 46181
	squeekboard: 21485
	libcall-ui: 4637
	proc: 21526
	phosh: 58620
	feedbackd: 6035
	feedbackd-device-themes: 953
	gtherm: 1734
	haegtesse: 2105
	wys: 2442
Total lines of code: 316399

There are easier ways to scam people than designing the first phone with FOSS schematics since the GTA-04 in 2012 and writing over 300k lines of code (and that’s not counting the code that Purism has added to other projects that it didn’t start).

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Anyone can put down a list of project names and some numbers and act all indignant. Theranos could have done, and did, all those things. Where are the customers’ phones? I paid in 2019, I was given a 6 month lead time, and since then I’ve just been lied to as have countless other people who have been swindled by Purism. It’s a scam.

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Overconfidence and poor execution I count as different than a scam. While I agree that Purism has been poor with regard to their communications they have been delivering and continue to deliver products albeit significantly behind the schedule they seemed to be confident in previously.

Not sure what that has to do with the topic of them not providing refunds in a timely manner though?

Actually not sure what several of these recent messages have to do with the topic of not issuing refunds. Sure there’s other companies that have done worse things, that doesn’t make not honoring the refund policy nor unilaterally changing the refund policy in your favor ok.

Also if issuing refunds in a timely manner would cause Purism to fail that’s a separate problem, though one I don’t see evidence for.

I have seen evidence that Purism will issue refunds more promptly when pressured by outside (legal) forces, which is unfortunate for their image, though not so much so as for me to expect it to ruin the business nor to need extreme intervention like closing the entire business, that seems a bit excessive given what I’ve seen so far.

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I’m not going to debate your “scam” defnition, but if you keep blatantly lying, I’ll have to give you a timeout.

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If it was just “overconfidence and poor execution”, Purism wouldn’t continue to advertise delivery timescales they know they will not meet (within 60/90/20/whatever days) because there is a 3/4/5 year backlog they are completely unable to meet, yet they continue to induce more poor innocent people into parting with their money on completely false pretences.

If all it was was advertising ambitious timescales, failing to meet them, then turning honest, you could perhaps argue that it was just overconfidence and poor execution.

When one continues to induce people to part with their money in the way Purism does, and when one continues to lie, purports to unilaterally retrospectively change one’s refund policy, when they promise refunds within a certain timescale which then don’t materialize, etc. etc. - that’s a scam.

That’s why we see a never-ending stream of threads started by more and more victims of the scam, who have realized they’ve been scammed - despite many such threads having been started over the years by earlier victims, which perhaps the new victims could have read and avoided getting scammed. But then I know that at least some of these threads have been hidden from public view by Purism - which also says a lot.

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And here goes the infamous “moderator” which hides and deletes the threads whenever people expose the scam. The company’s liability is one thing, but your personal actions and potential criminal liability for you personally in deliberately hiding information which could prevent new people from falling for the scam is another thing. Just bear in mind I’m keeping the screenshots. That’s called evidence.

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The difference is that Purism actually did the work and you can easily verify it by downloading the source code and examining it and compiling it. GNOME wouldn’t be incorporating libadwaita, libhandy, calls and chatty if Purism’s code was garbage. Purism is doing serious dev work.

Look, there are valid reasons to criticize the company, but I frankly dismiss you as a crank when you start calling the company a “scam”. I write code and I used to work in a company that designed custom hardware, so I have some clue how hard it is to create a Linux phone from scratch versus taking a Qualcomm or MediaTek reference design, and slapping your logo on it and installing the latest version of Android and making some tweaks to the skin for your corporate branding. The L5 is an extremely complex phone with 2.5 times more components than the standard smartphone, and getting it to work means doing kernel work and lots of work on the user interface, so this is nothing like pumping out another Android phone.

If your argument is that Purism knowingly lied to you in 2019, consider the fact that there wasn’t a global parts shortage in 2019, so it is highly likely that Purism thought that it could quickly produce all its back-orders in 6 months time. However, it couldn’t get the FCC certification until all the components were functioning on the phone. NXP poorly documented how the CSI2 camera interface worked, and it took Purism months of painful trial and error to figure it out, so the Librem 5 didn’t end up getting its FCC until July 22, 2021, which it needed to be able to start shipping the L5 in large batches. By that point, there was a 52 lead time just to get the i.MX 8M Quad processor.

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It’s not a very wise idea to accuse people of doing things by posting slandering notes on their door. Or posting on a forum they own. It just so happens that cleaning the door is what I do on this forum. It’s called sanitation.

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I remember someone else commenting on similar accusations that Purism is not very good at scamming because they keep shipping phones to their customers :yum: Like me, I’m typing this on my Librem5, I patiently waited years glued on the Estimate your Librem5 shipping topic until they reached my place in the queue, and then I received it.

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Correction.
Librem 5 has an assembled in the USA product. - the parts that a regular person would have no hope analyzing are still made in china.

but you haven’t even tried using it? - and the Librem hardware isn’t exactly going to scream past it in a race… - still this is something that I’ve said in a previous comment, those just looking at specifications, without having actually used the device are guessing, they don’t know how well the thing performs, or what optimizations might make relatively weak looking hardware perform out of its class.
(it’s just as bad when the Librem “haters” do it to the librem.)

no, the Librem is (rightly) criticized as being like a beta release because it purports to be a finished product.
The pine phone doesn’t have the same criticisms, because it claims to be a beta release - if you were to say this librem phone is a bit like a pre-release beta version people would (rightly) say that sucks.
if you say this pine phone is a bit like a pre-release beta version people would (rightly) ask you what did you expect when buying a product that is called beta?
-you see the situation is the same, but the customer expectation is different based on what they were told at the point of sale.

I agree, I think (based on the reviews etc that I’ve seen), that it is subjectively the best device for me - that’s why I ordered one. (note, ordered, not backed, pre-bought, etc.) I ordered one with a promise that they could deliver in a “few months”.

Linking to other articles of crappy corporate behavior does not absolve purism if their duty to do better.
This is a classic “what about” argument. I say Purism make promised that they cannot deliver, and then withhold refunds from sales contracts they know that they cannot complete. - you say, but what about Tesla…

uuuuh… that’s kind of exactly the problem with Purism too though?
They took my money years ago, promising delivery in a few months. - that money is long since gone and I have no device, and they keep emailing asking for people to invest so they can afford to buy components?
This is pretty much a definition of a ponzi scheme. Purism already spent the funds they’ll need to make my device, - they are relying on new customers to get funds to buy the component parts to fulfil old orders… eventually, (if they run out of new customers to fund the back orders) they’ll leave people disappointed - the irony of course is the only people that entered into an agreement with purism knowing they could lose money are the funding backers… and it’s them who are shouting hardest in support search for fresh suckers to help fund their go at actually getting the device!

but there is a (huge) difference between supporting purism (as you have by project backing, or supporting as I have done by buying product) and supporting their shady business practices.
I can say, I support the products, and I support the goals, but I do not support their business practices. - and to be honest, we’ve seen time and time again that they are very slow to respond…
It took months last year for them to actually change their website from “order now and get it in a few months” to say “pre-order now, we have very delayed delivery times”

  • this is a sales practice they were using where they would deliberately lie to their customers to secure orders. - and it took months of people complaining in these forums before they just did the right thing and gave an honest(ish) account of their lead times.

I don’t see it as overconfidence…
we’re coming up to about 3 years since this went from pre-order to order:
https://web.archive.org/web/20191011093525/https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ (11-oct-2019)
https://web.archive.org/web/20191016155227/https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ (16-oct-2019)
(but it was backorder in the shop)

in December of 2022 (9 months into the pandemic, whilst supply lines were shutdown and they knew they had no components to fulfil backorders and could not supply new orders, they were saying “place your order now and get it in a few months.” https://web.archive.org/web/20201221052514/https://shop.puri.sm/shop/librem-5/

Kyle was making posts in this forum and sending out news letters talking about supply chain issues, but in April it still said “place your order now and get it in a few months!” https://web.archive.org/web/20210405111134/https://shop.puri.sm/shop/librem-5/

and even then the update they made was to change to “currently shipping back orders place your order now and get it in a few months” - so honest(ish) acknowledging the delays, but STILL making promises they knew they couldn’t keep on delivery times.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210427032938/https://shop.puri.sm/shop/librem-5/

so… up to that point you could have believed maybe they didn’t notice… but they noticed, and made a conscious choice to keep lying to customers.

Even when they said that they stopped shipping because they had no parts to build devices with… they kept lying to customers.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210921090149/https://shop.puri.sm/shop/librem-5/

this time last year they were telling people, order in October '21 and you’ll have a phone by Q1 2022,
we’ve now just about to enter Q4 2022 and people who ordered a year before that are still waiting…
This is more than overconfidence and poor delivery.

Honestly… I’ve seen it all now, you sit there talking as if Purism can do no wrong when it purposefully misrepresents itself to customers to secure orders, whilst calling out another company that is advertising with some integrity!!

You’re conflating extended delivery times and poor ethics.

A company that advertises buy now and get it in 2 years probably has the same lead times as a Librem phone, but are significantly more honest in what they are saying…

I’d rather buy from a company that doesn’t lie to its customers.

what about those that were told they could buy now and get in a few months in the end of 2020 or in the first quarter of 2021? - what about when as above Purism knew (and Kyle was saying they didn’t have parts.) but they kept saying buy it now get in in a few months (over a year into the pandemic?)

Kyle (many times) hid behind “a few months” being vague, but what about this people who ordered in Oct’21 being told the could get it Q4 '21 or Q1 '22 - it’s at least 6 months after these guys were told they’d have the device… but they are still waiting…

what would you call it when an entity make a promise to deliver something in a given timescale but they know that they can’t?

If you waited YEARS, then it’s clear that you were a project backer. - the company said, hey give us money now, we’ll use your funds to develop products. if we are successful at bringing a product to market you can have it, as a reward for believing in us…
The agreement you made was really complete when they used the funds to pay developers. you took your chance, knowing that there was a possibility the deal wouldn’t work out.
You are not a consumer, you were an investor, and you were looking for a reward or dividend (you invested in a product idea, your dividend is the phone.)

The experience I am writing about, (and the one the thread starter is talking about is very different.
the contract we had with Purism is that we would purchase a phone that was complete, and which they said was shipping, and that we’d get it (in a few months, or by Q4’21/Q1’22)… but actually, Purism took our money, and used it to fund that reward to their early investors. - and they appear to be left in a position where they don’t have funds or supply lines to secure components, (are sending emails - I think 3 in the last year) asking for funding, - the last one, of a few days ago specifically says that they need funds to buy parts.

It’s like claiming that Barnie Madoff wasn’t a scammer because some early investors did get some money out.

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