That’s not quite right. The actual question there was how many work on PureOS for the phone, and if try to count 20 devs on the team page, it becomes clear they can’t all be dedicated to the phone. The new, (phone specific) faces seem to be ~15, needing to be fed by the campaign money.
Also, remember that there is a continuous money inflow. At the end of the campaign we were at about 3000 devices ordered, with an average of at least 3 devices sold per day in the months after. So my conservative estimation was that this could have doubled to 6000 phones by June.
However, Todd said in that episode that shipping the devkits led to an unexpected wave of orders. I also did not factor in the effect of recent marketing efforts.
I hope there is one
So maybe they are actually closer to 10,000 pre-orders by now? I would sure hope so.
Nice . We are going to be a pretty small community it looks like . But I feel it will be a very enthusiastic development community . The brotherhood of the Librem 5 . Almost feels like a secret most of the normies just cant grasp !
Having phones like the Librem 5 is incredibly important for activists, reporters, dissidents, etc. (I have given a couple classes to activists about how to remain anonymous online, not because I’m expert, but just because I happened to show up at a meeting and people started asking me questions about security.)
My hope is that once Purism and PINE64 show that there is a market and we get a couple thousand apps that work on Linux phones, then other manufactures will decide to also start making Linux mobile devices. It starts with companies like Fairphone and Gemini, then it moves onto companies like Archos, Clevo, Acer and ASUS, that have history of being willing to work with Linux until it finally hits the mainstream and Linux becomes a viable third mobile OS.
However, even if mobile Linux never reaches more than 1% of the market, it will still have an effect, because it will tell Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, etc, that people have an alternative, so they better not abuse their power too much, because people have the ability to switch.
Going from 720 to 1080 would cause significant battery drain. We are talking 15-20 % for moderate to heavy users (high SOT).
We could see that in some devices which switched it year over year.
And considering that this phone already comes with not so power efficient processor (compared to Qualcomm or Huawei’s Kirins) , we can’t afford any extra unnecessary hits on the battery.
I really hope they stick w 720. I had it on my Galaxy Nexus, GS3 and OG Moto X and 0 complaints for the “sharpness”.
It’s a big market. Over 1 billion units annually. 1% of that is a lot of phones. I would think that that is more than enough to sustain a sub-market for Linux / open source / freedom phones. To me that is a credible alternative but neither credible nor alternative is unambiguously defined.
Note that annual smartphone sales have for the first time stopped growing, so I have been conservative with the above claim.
1.5552670 billion smartphones were sold last year according to Gartner, so 1% would be 15.5 million phones. If Purism ever got to that level, it would be outselling Sony, HTC and Google. Even capturing just 0.001% of the market or 15,500 phones per year will probably be a sustainable business for Purism. To be able to start influencing the industry, however, Purism & PINE64 probably need to capture 0.01% of the market or 155,000 phones per year.
Although it does depend on how many players there are in the sub-market for Linux / open source / freedom phones, and how that sub-market is divided up, and how their individual goals differ.
Oh, and you have to be geared up to fulfill that many phones. Good problem to have.
