Hi Mike.
Some background:
For a while, XZ1C (lilac) was an officially supported /e/ device. This was because, after successfully producing some unofficial builds for this device, and for Z5 Compact (suzuran), and Z3 Compact (z3c), I volunteered to become the maintainer of the official /e/ ROMs for these devices (all of which I happen to own, and all of which have been my ‘daily driver’ for some period of time).
My unofficial XZ1C /e/ builds, and the first official /e/ build, contained the excellent Sony stock camera app alongside /e/'s Camera application. I was asked to remove the Sony app from the build because, i was told, it was important for /e/ users to have the same experience across all /e/ devices. I was not prepared to do that (I did not - and still do not - accept the ‘identical experience’ argument), so I stepped aside as the maintainer of the official /e/ ROM for this device.
With no maintainer, the device stopped being officially supported by /e/, and I went back to producing unofficial and custom builds. The unofficial builds contain both camera apps; the custom builds contain only the Sony camera app, and many of /e/'s forked apps have been replaced by the upstream apps from which they were forked. (And of course they don’t include /e/'s Apps app )
I have recently made an unofficial R build for XZ1C, which seemed to work as well as the test R builds for the official devices. It does not contain the Sony camera app, because the maintainer(s) of the unofficial Lineage OS ROMs (on which all the /e/ ROMs are based) have not been able to make the Sony camera app work in Android 11 / R / LOS 18.
So to answer your question, at least in part. This device is my current daily driver, and I have no plans to change to a different device. If the current one breaks, I’ll find another on eBay or elsewhere. My plans for the future for XZ1C are:
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to continue to build and make available unofficial and custom Q builds, for as long as /e/ continue to maintain the Q branch of their codebase. I don’t plan to move my own device to Android R until I have to, as I don’t want to give up the Sony camera app.
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once /e/ releases dev
R builds that are ready for daily use for their officially supported Sony devices, to build and make available unofficial ROMs for XZ1C, along roughly the same schedule as /e/'s releases (i.e. using the v0.nn-r
tag in the /e/ releases repository). These builds will not contain the Sony camera app, which opens up the possibility of
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XZ1C again becoming an official /e/ device. I guess /e/ would be happy for that to happen, so long as I am prepared to do the duties of ROM maintainer. I haven’t yet decided whether or not I want to do that
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to explore the possibility of providing OTA updates for my unofficial builds (for XZ1C and a small number of other Sony devices which are currently “stuck” on Android 7 / Nougat). I hope this will happen but it may not, and I make no promises about timescales
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to keep all my source files (device and kernel trees, vendor blobs) available in freely accessible git repositories, so that anyone else who is interested can duplicate and improve upon what I have done.
As I said, all of the above are my current plans and intentions, but I make no promises or guarantees: circumstances change, and my plans may well change with them. But in the short term at least, I hope the XZ1C will remain a viable device, supported by /e/ - officially or unofficially - for as long as you, or anyone else needs it. Whether or not you want to buy one, on the basis of the above, is of course entirely a matter for you
Sorry to go on for so long, but it wasn’t a “yes or no” question you asked