It didn’t fail, really. A bunch of distros managed to port themselves which AFAIK, this hasn’t seen the success rate that the PinePhone managed to achieve. You were even able to flash a really old version of Android on it and it well… booted.

Granted, yes, even though you could put OpenSuse, Gentoo, and Fedora on the PinePhone, that alone didn’t make them very usable. Fair enough.

PostmarketOS, Mobian, and Manjaro had dedicated their work to the PinePhone to get it a better experience. It got to the point where folks were actually trying to use it as a daily driver. The major obstacles with PinePhone and any of its iterations is the same culprit that probably made it very difficult for Ubports, FirefoxOS et. al to get to a point where it could actually be used as a daily driver.

IMO, the proprietary stuff keeps getting in the way of folks seeing progress with using it as daily drivers. The only other real thing for me that the PinePhone lacked is a good battery. Just a lousy battery. Hardware. Imagine, they figure out how to put a good battery in one and everything else would pretty much work half the time.

The benefit we all have at this point in time is that this did not end up like UBPorts or FirefoxOS because now the entire community can take advantage from what came out of this initiative. Mobile Gnome wasn’t a thing before. It is now and Purism guys have been contributing upstream last I checked. Same with Mobian guys. We didn’t have Plasma Mobile before. Now we do.

Maybe I’m just in the “glass half full” camp this time but I don’t see this as a loss.