This is interesting. Communities like postmarketOS put in a lot of effort to adapt their distribution to hardware that would otherwise be running Android.
Perhaps targeting commodity hardware is a more viable strategy than contending with newer platforms like Pinephone. Sure the device is more open, but most of the software support falls on the same community of developers. Lord knows they have enough build targets to maintain already.
I'm sure there will always be a place for custom hardware like Pinephone, Librem 5, but repurposing a flagship Android device is going to be a better value proposition for most people.
I own a first-gen Pinephone and it seemed really promising for a while. As things got fixed and the state of affairs improved, I think everybody's expectations shifted whether they realized it or not. Phone calls and SMS work perfectly, but after that started working, now I want it to do GPS and navigation. Doing this is possible, but pushes the poor Pinephone's hardware to its limit.
I think offloading progressively more tasks to a computer is perfectly natural, but ultimately (for me at least) this killed the Pinephone's viability. I wound up hitting a glass ceiling way too soon for comfort.
It's one thing if software support for specific tasks is nonexistent - this is a solvable problem, the community marches forward and fixes this as a matter of course.
But what do you do when you have the software support, but it just doesn't run on your Allwinner A64?
Maybe things have improved yet more since the last time I tried. I'll have to check out Pure Maps again.