Lot of the projects pinephone depends on are developed just by a bunch of talented individuals. Majority of the PinePhone specific bootloader/firwmare/kernel driver work and upstreaming is done by maybe 3 individuals, neither of whom are associated with any of the distros supported so far, AFAIK. And you can't have a working distro without a working kernel. A lot of value is based on the results of linux-sunxi.org project, and related communities, like lima project, etc. It's FOSS, hey. Everything depends on everything, and it's kind of a hard to support everyone.
I personally wish for a "Linux kernel CE" edition, in the future, being one of those kernel devs. ;)
How/where does one contribute? Is there a guide specifically for this (phone/pinephone development). I couldn't quite figure it out from the mobian repo ):
I don't know if Samuel accepts donations, but his contact info is here: https://sholland.org/about/ (he's responsible for the huge power saving optimizations that PinePhone got this year, and for the sound codec improvements, that were necessary for making calls work)
Allwinner SoC used in PinePhone has a longstanding community around it organized around http://linux-sunxi.org/ There are a lot of materials, including datasheets there, etc.
I personally wish for a "Linux kernel CE" edition, in the future, being one of those kernel devs. ;)