i've dabbled with allwinner socs for a few years now, and thanks to great community at linux-sunxi they have one of the best linux support. as for the phone itself, it comes from a company that already delivered good SBCs and a laptop. and they are not going to stop. they are not one-off kickstarter cashgrab event, and since they were quite successful with previous projects, the phone is going to be real too. for those that can't google themselves:

https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/
https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/PinePhone
https://www.pine64.org/blog/
http://linux-sunxi.org/A64
http://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlin...#Status_Matrix