More Updates please!

Okay I am sure I speak for the large part of the community here… I am excited. I just want more status updates more videos, photos, maybe a leak or two. I have read all the documentation I can get my hands on and such. I am only discouraged by the slow dribble of information that is coming out about this very important device. I think more information could only add to the excitement and the orders.

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You do not speak for me, just to make sure.

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got it, I will put you down for not wanting to know anything about the upcoming release.

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Wrong. I say that I feel me well informed and not being part of the “large part of the community” you think by your own you speak for.

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This would seem to be a strategic error. Best to speak your mind but speak only for yourself.

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I agree with @DCMike. With all due respect to the folks at Purism, the amount of public progress reporting has been rather disappointing. One update every two months with specs still not finalized is concerning. I’m excited for the phone and have been telling my family and friends about it, but it’s a little embarrassing not to have all of the specs or even a release date/month when they ask when the phone comes out. Those conversations usually end with “well I’ll just wait until you get yours before deciding if I’ll get one.”

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I think it is already pretty clear that they are sharing all the juicy details they have. They are already sharing info about arguable down right boring details. I’m not bothered by that, but there is only so much to talk about. Development isn’t exciting, and it takes work for their developers to try to convey in human terms what exactly it is that they are doing.

I think what is actually being felt is not a lack of reporting, but just slow development in general, which is to be expected from a small team from a small company. Our brains are just going bonkers because it thinks we should have had these phones by now. We can’t rush it. I want my phone now too, but more importantly, I want a phone done right.

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I am not an expert in phone design. However from the little I know I would think a Q3 delivery date would seemingly be impossible if we don’t see a finished unit pretty soon. How are they going to get a prototype out and then tool up for production in time if we haven’t seen the prototype unit.

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I noticed the countdown (in number of days) on the librem.one main page has disappeared.

Just saying, it was there. (Or do I just remember it was there?) I need to check the lights.

Tracy Johnson
BT

NNNN

I prefear they use their tine to work on the phone instead write useless and boring articles, i think they already sharing what is interesting to see and a kind of proof they are working on it.
What else they could share? Some binary explanation about firmware or some kind of step while writing some code? If someoene could understand those things he should be help developement, because normal ppl do not understand and even care about such things.

Everyone here is waiting for more news and want to see the phone fully working but imo we are distant from that point, watching their blog article seem realistic to think they will can’t ship the phone this year, and i hope they will not be hurry to ship a not redy yet phone.
Purism take your time and release it when is ready, just on the next blog when you annunce the next delay explain why and why you though you could ship it earlier.

They r doing a big work making this phone, everyone here want it but keep in mind the delusion to receive a phone with problems. Is better to wait more but receive a phone that work properly and have the main feature a secure phone must have, like the fractal e2ee cause atm is not ready yet, and honestly if tomorrow i will receive my librem5 able to make normal cals and sms will remain off till fractal e2ee using with my own secure owned server

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Be mildly optimistic :wink:

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My optimism is about have a secure phone when they will ship it, fractal need to support e2ee otherwise my android will be more secure with riot as e2ee client thab librem, i did not buyed a brick but a secure phone so i will be happier if purism will take their time to ship a better phone, also because there already are a ton of sht around them because of delay or specs and i saw a lot of ppl that wrote they will wait reviews before buy it, and if the first review will show a phone who make normal call and sms without an encrypted im who they partnered (matrix) will sound like an expebsive useless dumb phone.
I know chatty will support xmpp so a kind of encrypted im probably whould be there but i made A LOT of work convincing my friend to switch on matrix i can’t ask them to switch again to something else they could kill me.
I prefear to keep my optimism about have a phone who will not die after 5 years, but will live longer because of pieces quality, i want to be optimistic on the EU sale/support just in case something will broken too erlier, i gave them my money because i believe we deserve freedom in the tech era, and i hope purism don’t give a f
ck about wining people who want a supersecure phone just now. It is clear as they stated they will release it with basic funtionality and that’s fine since for such kind of phone im encryption imo is a basic feature

I have read this a lot that people think that if the phone doesn’t ship with strong encryption and such and such other feature of android that the phone will inherently be less secure. From my understanding of the Android platform this is actually not true. The one thing the Android platform is very good at is locking the data down so only google and preferred partners have access to it and that an attacker does not. Is that really more secure? I am not entirely sure.

For instance people have pointed out in the past that in fact it’s common ( at least at one time it was ) that manufacturers and telco were putting key loggers that would basically log every single key stroke and store it in a part of the memory that you don’t have access to. If an investigator had access to the physical device they can get all those keystrokes with equipment or with the help of the telco.

you have a microphone that can be turned on remotely without your knowledge, you have a camera that can be turned on without your knowledge, you have a gps module that can’t be disabled. Even if you don’t sign into google you have google trackers built into the os. depending on your device and permissions of the apps they can tell if you are asleep or awake, what your heart rate is, if your lying down or standing up etc…

the aggregate of these data points mean that a rogue application or google can basically know absolutely everything about you in ever moment of the day. even if you didn’t sign into google but had once signed into google and used and android device I would think they would be able to easily tell you are the same person and just keep on building the profile on you the same as if you had signed in. I am not saying they are doing that but they could very easily do that.

All that being considered I am then to think that a phone that doesn’t have strong encryption is less secure than a phone that has google baked into every ounce of the OS? yeah right. I think the librem phone needs encyption but that is a software thing. It can ship out the door without it and still respect your privacy way more than any android phone can no matter how you configure it.

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On most dev teams they have a person who’s sole responsibility is technical writing and someone who basically only does marketing. It should not bog them down development wise at all to give the community updates.

I agree with your pov, using lineage without gapps do not free me from unknown firmware, but since my phone was not bough from my telco at least they don’t know what i write, i can’t say the same without encryption. I prefear wait some months more giving time to devs to make an encryption module inside fractal and the other devs could benefit too from this extra time.

Anyway it their decision i think they know what is better to do, my only hope is they will focus on it if they decide to release it asap despite some must jave functions

I’m the technical writer on the Librem 5 team. There’s no pure marketing person on the team. Earlier this year I was the only person who could spare the time to contribute to progress updates, so they were less common.

One problem about writing updates is that simply reporting what was done in a 1-2 week period might not be interesting, or could be quite dry to read. It might be interesting to see what people are asking about in the forums and try to include information about those topics.

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Thanks for the info. And thanks for what you do. I will say if it’s one thing that I complain about at my own company is that there are not enough technical writers. So I definitely appreciate your time and the value you add to purism.

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I recommend skimming our source code repository to get in-depth leaks. Unfortunately, not all work we do is glamorous and shiny, but you can occasionally come across screenshots there too.

And, of course, we’re regularly leaking on Matrix, whenever an interesting question is asked :slight_smile:

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Yep, as @swinny said, people are just being disheartened by the slowness of this particular open-source project.

I don’t know why… what do people expect to happen? We’re lucky they’ve even managed to come as far as they have given the hurdle they’ve had to cross.

I know it’s not fair to say that when so many people have already paid up front but quite honestly, you should have known what you were getting yourself into before you invested in this.

Working software doesn’t just happen overnight and it’s the same for distinct hardware.

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I have full faith that Purism is going to deliver the Librem 5. I bought it after it was stated that it was delayed a second time, so I didn’t get a 6+ month delay- I already knew it would be Q3

But when I made my purchase, I was looking at it as an important donation to a much needed project! Everything Purism is doing is open, so if Purism failed for whatever reason in the future, another company could pick up where Purism left off and continue with the project.

While I am going to continue to support Purism whenever I can, wouldn’t it be awesome if, 10 years down the line, there were a dozen companies producing fully free GNU/Linux phones?

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