Interesting, they are building their own mobile compositor based on wlroots: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/phoc

This is the right way to do an open source phone by adopting existing modern desktop Linux tech. Instead of going your own Androidy path like Sailfish/Jolla is doing.

Always enjoy reading these updates. It's refreshing for a company to explain their progress in this kind of technical detail, another bonus of a free/open source product. Congrats to the Purism team for the progress, looking forward to seeing the new Linux phone.

Does anyone who follows this more closely know what mapping support there will be? I worry that it will be hard to match the quality of Google/Apple Maps with free software. I've tried using OsmAnd, but it's just a terrible experience compared to commercial map apps. This is a big deal for me and I imagine many others, because losing the traffic data and turn-by-turn navigation of commercial map apps is a dealbreaker, but allowing me to get rid of these most invasive apps would be a huge selling point, and would probably get me to buy the device all on its own.

the latest shipping update is still Q3 2019 (so 2-5 months away) and yet the marketing page still has a lot of hardware that is TBD: memory, cameras, and battery.

who wants to bet it will be pushed back to 2020?

Have they said anything about PWA support? If PWA is supported and on par with Chrome on Android this would allow a lot of PWA-compliant web apps (like Twitter, Gmail, and many more) to be ready to go right away. While not "native" the app ecosystem would at least have a chance to be there at the time of release.

It looks like the UI is coming together nicely. My only question is what battery life will look like on these phones. I'm guessing terrible for the first gen.

This is so exciting! I can't wait to buy one.