I'm sure it's a great daily driver for someone who wants to do almost nothing on their phone.
I mean we are talking about a $800 phone with no 5G modem. That's already a dealbreaker just from a carrier spectrum allocation aspect alone. This is a phone that will not get as good of a connection to do basic things like make calls and exchange texts/images/vidoes compared to any other device on the market.
I have found that keeping up with the modem capabilities of the average person's phone has been historically important for getting good signal strength and service in general.
I don't know if this is a resolved problem with 5G LTE and/or how backwards compatible 5G is with 4G (can they share spectrum? I honestly don't know, and perhaps it all depends on the particular carrier and how they allocate their deployments), but in the past you could notice that your 3G service would be a lot worse in its latter years of deployment than the 4G service simply because most customers had 4G and the carrier was allocating way more spectrum and bandwidth to 4G LTE service.
So you think about the median person replacing their phone every 3 years and you can figure that basically everyone in the US now has a phone with 5G capability, that's the service that cellular carriers are going to prioritize. That's also the level of service I am paying the carrier every month for.
And yes, 5G does get me a lot of great stuff like that. I actually tether my phone to my laptop or gaming handheld and play streamed games on it. I also work with large files so I can upload/download those large files to a server while I'm on a commuter train or in the passenger seat of a car. I can join video conference calls and things like that without issue.
I also personally switched from Android to iPhone specifically because so many carriers test iPhones so extensively (and there aren't an overwhelming amount of SKUs to test). The iPhone seems to have fewer carrier-related glitches in my experience. For example, I have a family member who switched from iPhone to Android and subsequently experienced call drops to their international calls consistently on their Android device (even after replacing the SIM card and other troubleshooting), but they resolved it entirely by switching back to an iPhone. Their carrier just didn't test out that particular Android phone that well, I guess. But the underlying reasons were irrelevant, they just need a phone that works for the purpose it's supposed to perform.
Considering that cellular service is the most expensive part of phone ownership, it seems to me that having a shitty device that can barely utilize the network's functionality is a way bigger problem than the device not being open source or not being Linux based or whatever line in the sane that Librem markets their very expensive phone under.
And of course I haven't even gotten into convenience features that depend on the proprietary app stores or carrier-integrated features like banking, transit cards/boarding passes/wallet functionality, CarPlay/Android Auto, visual voicemail, having a camera on hand that competes well with standalone point and shoot cameras, but I guess a Linux/Open Source die hard doesn't mind going back to the previous decade for those things. Still, those features are pretty damn enticing.
I can understand if you don't want those things but we have to remember that Librem is charging iPhone money for a device that does less things and has worse specs than a basic $100-300 Android phone.
So for you convenience is more important than supporting alternatives to the duopoly. I can understand that for sure, however keep in mind that duopoly is dangerous to the free market and its users in the long term. (See this: https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/). I do suffer from the lack of some features.
This is kind of like saying it would be better for me to take the train or bus to work and that car-based infrastructure harms everyone, but I live in San Bernadino or Indianapolis. You're not wrong but if you are in that environment it's clear which choice is more logical if I'm comparing a two hour bus ride or no transit at all to a 30-minute car ride.
Let's not forget also that Android is mostly open-source and that there are actual Google-free Android alternatives out there: GrapheneOS, /e/OS, LineageOS, CalyxOS...so Librem is competing with other open source alternatives that are far more capable and run on far better hardware.
Depending on your use case, Librem 5 may be more capable, since it runs full desktop OS, so you can run the same apps as on desktop, connect via ssh, install things with apt, use it in desktop mode, easier develop new apps etc.
Okay, I want to develop apps on the go and be able to plug my small device into a monitor and keyboard/mouse. If you bought an iPhone 16e and a Raspberry Pi, both devices together would be cheaper and individually have better specs than a Librem 5.
Or you could just get a tablet with a cellular modem like a Surface Pro, or a laptop like a Framework.
I know I'm beating this thread to death but I feel quite strongly that Librem is just many bars below other open source and/or fair/repairable device companies like Fairphone and Framework in terms of delivering a product that makes reasonable tradeoffs and isn't wildly behind other options in value.
Now you have to manage two devices, each not individually capable of what you want. You have to care about synchronization and backups, always being online. You can't use ordinary tools like ssh -X, you can't customize your working environment. By the way, Apple's artificial limitations on what you can and can't do with your devices are outrageous.
> Or you could just get a tablet with a cellular modem like a Surface Pro, or a laptop like a Framework.
Now, you're comparing a laptop with a phone. Seriously? Similar for the tablet, which is much larger and can't provide a good development environment, especially for Linux apps.
> Fairphone
What they're doing is great, but relying on Android is a dead end in my opinion, since Google decides its development direction and they have no reason to support user freedom. They're restricting the OS more with each update. (It's similar to switching from Chrome to Chromium trying to avoid the Manifest v3.) Can you even run LibreOffice on it? Supporting alternative operating systems is strongly needed.
I'm sure it's a great daily driver for someone who wants to do almost nothing on their phone.
I mean we are talking about a $800 phone with no 5G modem. That's already a dealbreaker just from a carrier spectrum allocation aspect alone. This is a phone that will not get as good of a connection to do basic things like make calls and exchange texts/images/vidoes compared to any other device on the market.