The problem isn't this developer being lazy or 15 years late, it's that this hardware wasn't built for Linux and only blessed groups (with a lot of money) get access to binary blobs. The FSF has a project to reverse engineer these blobs but it takes time. Same problem Linux used to have with laptops.

If you're looking for a daily driver the most reliable I've seen is the furi phone. Those guys are passionate and have put in a pathological amount of time to getting calls working world wide. They can only pull it off by supporting one phone that they sell.

I bought a OnePlus 6 for 50 euros from eBay and I can do a ton of things with it already. Plasma is great in mobile, and what did not work I got working pretty fast together with Kimi and DeepSeek.

For example here's patches to get NFC YubiKey working in Secrets app:

https://github.com/pimeys/oneplus6-yubikey-nfc

It is a work in progress but pretty easy to pick things up and fix in this age of agents...

Is there a general consensus why "AI" isn't helping out a lot for a free software phone?

  - AI code generation is way over-hyped and is only 1% capable of the feats that the advocates claim.
  - AI is too expensive to use, and even if it is 100 times less expensive than a human for the same task, there is still too much cost involved.
  - AI are secretly nerfed for free-software projects.
  - No one has bothered to try AI on free-software phone projects yet.
  - Other?

I agree with your sentiment ; very likely the Fairphone people are restricted by NDAs from the SoC vendor who are the ultimate cause for lack of proper mainline Linux support.

The SoC vendors get Android working, get the drivers going, help do ports or modifications for major customers and hide it all behind NDAs, blobs, sometimes a bunch of hacks and all of it is closed source work.

The postmarketOS guys to their credit are trying to do "proper" mainline work which is admirable but probably frustrating, non-trivial and requires a lot of reverse engineering.

By "Linux phone", what are your expectations exactly? Because if you talk "only" about the userspace, I have been daily driving Ubuntu Touch since 2019 on a Fairphone 2 and then a Pixel 3a and it is working like a charm. But it is using halium so you still have an Android kernel. So if you also talk about the kernel then yeah Postmarket OS is the closest to this and quite good on Fairphone already, I think some people could daily drive it if they feel adventurous. Then if you talk about 100% free software then indeed, nothing with a working modem is available as far as I know. And if you talk about open hardware then we are clearly not here even if I dream about it...

You're not being negative enough when it comes to non-Android linux phones, and even when it comes to Android, there's just ONE serious project - GrapheneOS which has people working full-time and which will be officially supported on future Motorola flagships.

Unfortunately even that one is missing modern replacements of outdated unsupported AOSP sample apps (like Phone and Contacts, others can be replaced without extra privileges).