In a recent Bloomberg Technology interview, Todd Weaver, CEO of Purism, challenged the widespread belief that building smartphones in the U.S. is economically unfeasible. Purism’s Liberty Phone—manufactured with made-in-USA electronics—stands as working proof.
While President Trump has called for more U.S.-based smartphone production and even launched the Trump T1 mobile service, Weaver pointed out a crucial detail: the T1 appears to be a rebranded Chinese-made Wingtech device. In contrast, Purism’s Liberty Phone is the only smartphone on the market built using U.S.-manufactured components and assembled domestically, all while running on a secure, open-source operating system: PureOS.
Weaver dismantled the narrative that domestic smartphone production is cost-prohibitive. “It’s actually cheaper than many claim,” he told Bloomberg hosts Ed Ludlow and Caroline Hyde. By vertically integrating hardware and software development—and avoiding surveillance-driven advertising and data mining business models—Purism avoids the hidden costs passed on to consumers through privacy violations and long-term data exploitation.
Read more at Purism.
The newly launched Trump T1 Phone is marketed as a secure, privacy-respecting smartphone Made in the USA.
Not only is the hardware not Made in USA (it appears to be based on an off-the-shelf Chinese design from Wingtech and is believed to be assembled in China), the underlying software upon which it runs – the operating system – is Android, developed by one of the world’s largest data harvesting company, Alphabet (Google).
Ars Technica is also reporting that it’s possibly a device made in China.
As noted by Purism often in the past, Purism authors and maintains PureOS, which is a secure and privacy–respecting distribution of Debian GNU/Linux, and is not based on Android.
Read at Purism.
Welcome back! As we enter the second half of 2025, we’re wrapping up the last few tasks to release the PureOS Crimson alpha for all Librem devices.
In our last post, we mentioned that there was a key task remaining for gnome-control-center, the GNOME Settings application. In that post, we referred to it as “that one task for gnome-control-center”.
It may have been only one task on the milestone, but it was certainly a large task!
Read at Purism.