"But my friend runs a PinePhone as a daily driver"
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I appreciate the people who daily drive pinephones. They are paving the way for when they'll be viable alternatives for the masses. (Or verifying that they won't be, we'll see.)
Don't forget all the developers working on the kernel, camera support, modem firmware, desktop environments like Phosh and others, distro devs like Mobian or postmarketOS and others, app devs who work on supporting mobile and many other developers and contributors. Even bloggers who report on updates.