This is good sound debate, like everyone obeying the rules driving carefully around a roundabout.
However, with deference to GOS and understanding how it must feel to have the start up AOSP stepped on by the elephant that is google / android / wait for the courts to break up the monopoly and watch this space, there has not been a clear instruction or communication from the GOS comms team about what users should do in regards to device upgrades.
The hardware of phones, as outlined in good detail above about the disaster that is PinePhone, speaks volumes about standard consumer and investment decisions.
So too does the reasoned argument, again above, that the increasing panic displayed in the communications of the GOS public relations teams are having on users who as a community are already heavily invested emotionally and therefore point of call to put dollars and pence into any financing of an OEM.
Aside from the option offered above of going to google cap in hand asking for (or paying for) access to pixel coding to ensure ongoing hardware support of pixel 10 series and beyond, as well as the evident overtime mutual benefit GOS has delivered Google / Android in pointing out major security flaws for which GOS has been paid very modestly by Google for pointing out, where does GOS want to land as a community, collective or company?
I for one buy pixel phones for GOS and have no interest in Google android, mainly to provide my children data privacy growing up. The utility offered by iOS is frustratingly in small but measureable quantity such that I still use it as a couple of key apps as well as family sharing with members far afield across my country and region allow so.
Recent widely publicised GOS existential panic attacks by the comms team, amplified enthusiastically across the tech media, forced me very reluctantly to upgrade my older son who is at university to an iphone 16 over my prefered pixel 10 pro (pro because of the vapour chamber).
I am and continue to be in search of clear communications from GOS about future hardware support of the pixel 10 and onwards. Longer development of compatibility is a frustrating reality when a monopolistic tech firm tries to step on you for daring to live in its shadow, but it is a communication I have not found.
With the pixel 9 series basically landing as a pixel 8 mark II with better aesthetics and a bit more RAM, with the only discernable upgrade being a vapour chamber on the pro series, I am left wanting for better hardware. Hence the reluctant EOFY jump at the iphone 16 base for my son, who has the privacy instincts of a neon street sign anyway so I figured having come of age GOS might not have been for him.
I still have my younger children on graphene, using pixel 8s and 6a's, which should keep going a little longer. But the TMSC 3nm pixel 10 pro is my GOS white whale.
Simply, I want to know if I should keep hunting it or unlike Moby Dick call it a day, go panic buy a pixel 9 in the bargain bin, and wait for armageddon?