This is achieved through the utilization of mainline Linux-based mobile operating systems, assembly of the phone using screws, and facilitating simplified disassembly for repairs and upgrades.

The community edition PinePhones featured a branding on the back cover and shipped with a custom box designed by the partnered artists.

The docking bar is capable of delivering power to the phone via USB-C power-in (3 A 5 V), outputting digital video via HDMI, and has 10/100 Mbit/s Ethernet connectivity and two USB 2.0 ports (for example, external storage, mouse and keyboard).

[11] In February 2021, Pine64 announced the end of community edition devices,[12] and that the default operating system for the production-ready PinePhone would be Manjaro using the KDE Plasma Mobile graphical environment.

The long production life and sharing a common A64 platform with the PineTab tablet and Pine A64 boards is meant to encourage tinkerers to create mods and DIY projects based on the PinePhone.

Together with the hardware kill switches, this results in larger printed circuit boards (PCBs) and less energy efficiency compared to the mass-produced Android phone that has an integrated System on a Chip, such as the Snapdragon, Helio or Exynos.

[1][19][20] Pine64 is the second phone maker (after OpenMoko) to offer booting from a microSD card, which allows users to try out one or more operating systems before installing in the internal flash memory.

[21] In 2019 and 2020, Pine64 stated that it was developing four mods: a Psion Series 5-inspired physical keyboard,[22] a 5000 mAh battery, wireless charging[23] and a fingerprint sensor.

In order to mitigate potential threats to privacy, these components communicate with the rest of the system only over serial protocols, such as USB 2.0, I2S and SDIO, which do not allow direct memory access (DMA).

[26] In late 2020, Pine64 started an incentive called the Nutcracker Challenge, in order to encourage the development of open-source wireless networking on the BL602 Wi-Fi and Bluetooth board.

[30] Because these community OS projects were involved in the development of the PinePhone, it has been ported to 19 Linux distributions and seven graphical user interfaces, as of August 2021,[31] such as Ubuntu Touch by UBports, postmarketOS, Mobian (Debian ARM), LuneOS, Nemo Mobile and Maemo Leste.

Official Community Editions were released with special branding for five projects: postmarketOS, UBPorts, KDE Plasma Mobile, Manjaro and Mobian.