> As an American, I will order this phone as soon as it’s available to me!
It won’t be. From the time of their first phone the company actively made the choice to not support the US market. There’s the obvious spectrum difference and cost to certify, but the real reason they don’t want to touch it is litigation risk on patents and whatnot.
Main problem with this is that Google can end it as soon as they want to as Google effectively controls Android. Tactics like remote attestion will make it increasingly harder for Graphene to exist
This seems like the bigger problem to me the kind of people who are interested in this phone seem like the same kind of people who would be perfectly happy to order it from Europe or Asia.
I don’t think many people who really want this are the kind of people who just walk into a cell phone store and buy whatever tickles their fancy.
The practicality of that may depend on the exact details of the modem. For example, I believe it's possible to get a fairphone in the US, but last I checked it was a poor choice because it had awful support for cell frequencies actually in use. This lists "global roaming modem configuration" which may mean that it has good coverage, but... it also might not.
Jolla is saying they'll try to make it work on as many frequencies as possible for global support. I don't know the brand and how seriously to take that but usually English-speaking countries support are among the top priorities
they did indeed have a crowdfunded tablet that went wrong in supply chain, and basically bankrupted the company. Many funders lost out. That's unfortunate, and perhaps might have been avoidable with better organisation. Absolutely it sucks. They did have a limited refund program as others have noted.
However, they do not have a continous history of not shipping. I personally owned their two previous phone handsets, both shipped. Also I've bought and run their firmwares on third party handsets, they also shipped the software.
They did offer refunds in the form of vouchers for their shop. I can understand if that's not something everyone is interested in, but it's not nothing. I made use of that successfully.
It wasnt offered to everyone. They did the whole thing by trickling out information based on batches based on when you ordered. And for the record I wasnt shipped a tablet, given a refund or offered a voucher and based on comments at the time I wasnt the only one. It was a total writeoff.
As an American, I will order this phone as soon as it’s available to me!
I’m not aware of any similar option for us at the moment so I’m a little sad.