Purism (creator of FOSS friendly phones and hardware) 2023 financial report , income grew by 350% in three years and the company is profitable

I asked for a refund when they kept delaying shipment of my Librem 5. I was simply denied and that was it. They told me I could still choose to receive the phone, but I don't want it since it's a bad, practically useless product now.

I reported them in my country for it.

Allegations are real. It took them about a year to give me mine, and I only got ~60% back

Its not an integer overflow?

I got a laptop back in 2018, and it shipped really fast. It's not my daily driver, but it works well when I'm on the road, and the battery life is pretty good. Granted, I replaced the OS with a distro I prefer and customized the hell out of it, so that might contribute to my experience. Tbh, I was pretty impressed with it (still am), and I was going to buy a Librem 5 when they came out. I wanted to wait and not just throw money at them because I didn't want to get burned. After all the horror stories and crap reviews, I passed on that and won't touch the company with a 10 foot pole, and I thank past me for not throwing money at them.

I think that the company started with noble intentions and made a decent product at first, but they got in way over their heads and now they're floundering.

You managed to get your money back?! How?

Well I upvoted the post so that people will see the comments!

No need to kill the messenger. It's an argument why vote counts aren't always a good tool to judge the content.

I mean, a FOSS aligned company is profitable! 🔼

B-but it's also Purism with all those customer horror stories and sketchy behavior. 🔽

I'm confused, okay!? 🔃

I daily drive the Librem 5 and am typing this reply from the phone. The honest feedback (and tl;dr) is that it is a good device for those who value privacy over convenience.

The hardware kill switches are a nice touch, especially on the camera/microphone. I don't have moments of suspicion that if I have a conversation about a toaster that I will suddenly start seeing ads about toasters everywhere.

It's nice not to be bombarded with notifications to review their app, accept TOS that my data will be used to sell me stuff, irremovable bloatware, and some of the other annoyances we got used to experiencing.

As a basic communications device it works fine. Phone calls (VoLTE) and SMS text messaging works, depending if your carrier allows you to BYOD and provides the network info. SMS can sometimes get "clogged" in the modem when there is a very active group text; but for me usually resetting the modem using the hardware killswitch, a 15 second process, fixes it.

Of course the downside is a more limited app ecosystem compared to Android. You will have to search for convergent apps and flatpaks, but I have found everything I need through Flathub.

The camera does not take influencer quality photos, but if you need to take a quick picture of something and share it, then it works.

Battery life is definitely something to be desired, but I can make it through a work day with automatic suspend doing some light web browsing and sending some messages throughout the day.

Since I mostly use a computer for web browsing, emails, and word processing, I dock my phone and use it in desktop mode. It's not blazing fast, but for my purposes it is more than fine. Its actually a cool feeling to sit at my desk, start typing an email, listening to music, and then undocking my phone and continue the email on the go from the same device.

lol.

Just search for Purism customer support experiences.

I'm honestly amazed there hasn't been a fraud, or some other consumer protection type criminal investigation.

All that baggage, and their hardware is also laughably outdated and overpriced.

Which is unfortunate, because the concept is amazing and clearly there's a sizable market for it.

Here is an example of just ONE flavor of Purism customer experiences:

Announce current gen hardware and current pricing.

Customer pays

Customer receives hardware 5 years later, after being told approx. 362 times that cancellation refunds are down, or unable to be processed.

Customer tries to immediately return the 5 year old laptop that was just delivered and is told "No Returns"

There are other variations that you can read about on various forums.

The phone is extremely low end hardware and not pleasant to use.

They’ve done great work investing in the software but its still young and incomplete.

I would buy a new one if it had significantly more powerful hardware.

Bought a $2,000 laptop. Broke after about 10 days of light use.

The software has improved a lot since I got the phone in 2022 (I pre ordered it in 2017)

I would be willing to use it as a daily driver if it had better battery life

As the other poster said, the camera is kind of crap, but I don’t take many pictures. At least you don’t have to manually set the exposure/balance/focus to take a picture now, though

The updater has been a little flakey and I’ve just fallen back to update via command line frequently

Fairly thick, but it feels quite sturdy to me. SD card slot and headphone jack are great. Charging speed is kind of slow

It may be less private than deGoogled Android right now, but in the long run Android is a dead end.

Privacy-wise CalyxOS is even better in my opinion.

Tho I really want to run Linux phone.