Now, as such things go, many of the unique ideas dreamt up by Sailfish have been absorbed into the major OSs (which will no doubt claim they innovated them themselves), and Jolla had to close because competing at both the software and the hardware model simultaneously turned out to be unsustainable for them. And my own Jolla phone developed a hardware fault and that was that.
So I reluctantly switched back to Android. But none of the mainstream OSs managed to quite capture that magic, even despite having now copied most of its features. And when I tried the latest version of Sailfish on a Pinephone about a year ago, it too no longer felt like it had that sleekness I had come to love on the Jolla.
I did too, and I more or less hated it. The whole UI was impossible-to-remember gestures and swipes this way and that. Pretty much like iOS, but even worse. (Even Android has been going that way since then. Can't tell for sure when its usability peaked; sometime between 2013 and 2018?)
The main idea you had to understand was that you have 'edge' gestures, and 'inner' gestures. 'Edge' gestures relate to functionality that has to do with the phone as a whole and are available at all times, and 'inner' gestures relate to functionality that has to do with the specific app currently in use, and if any actions are available they will be clearly signposted in the app. And the apps were explicitly designed with this interface in mind.
I thought the onboarding tutorial was very clear, and the learning curve to start using the phone effectively was negligible once the above 'phone vs app gestures' was understood.
By contrast, Android has attempted to copy these gestures, but they are severely lacking with no unifying theme in my view (I cannot speak for iPhones since I do not own one, but from my limited interaction with them they don't seem any better, and when I used relative's iPads, my personal response was that the gestures effectively needed to be 'learned' and really didn't make intuitive sense to me).
Effectively android doesn't quite make the distinction clear between 'edge vs inner' or 'phone vs app' gestures, and it comes down to the user (and/or app developer) to figure out what works where by trial and error; the horizontal swipe from the edge constitutes a 'back' button (but only if you keep it 'pressed'), the vertical constitutes a 'apps list' button (but only if you keep it 'pressed'), and a vertical swipe without keeping it pressed acts as a 'home' button. The only thing they've kept from Sailfish is the top-to-bottom edge swipe showing you notifications. But it shows that effectively instead of making gestures a first class citizen, they've just said "how can we add gestures that act as buttons", but it's still a button-centric experience rather than a genuinely intuitive gesture-based UX.
As a result, most people I know tend to turn these off and use the software buttons instead, despite the slighty cost of screen real-estate. I've chosen to keep them on, but whenever I hand my phone over to my wife, the first thing she asks is if I can enable buttons so that she can do what she wants to effectively.
Two things:
1) Only goes to show that "intuitive" isn't the same for everyone. (Stands to reason; neither is intuition.)
2) Look at the length of your post. Anything that needs that much explanation can hardly be called "intuitive".
I didn't know we're married, but it seems I'm your wife. ;-)
From the best I can tell, Jolla is still an active company:
At some point they became a 'consultancy' company, effectively using Sailfish OS on devices or whatnot, but without bespoke hardware. There were a very small number of devices that more or less supported Sailfish.
I was surprised to see they have now restarted their hardware attempts, with a limited batch of specially ordered "reference implementation" devices, made by a partner in Turkey.
I might have been tempted to order one if the campaign hadn't ended already. But, having said that, I don't have much faith in such 'limited batch campaigns' anymore. Having a phone whose entire ecosystem is at risk of completely expiring after a couple of years isn't fun anymore; even if it's still a linux phone in theory.
It's unfortunate that they're taking a closed source model when others like System76 and Librem are using their hardware sales to fund open source development.
There's also webOS, which was originally funded by Palm and doesn't seem to have any open source development any longer, and the Maui project which is basically one guy trying to make his own Linux UI.
I'd love to see a team with decent UX sensibilities tackle a touch-first Linux UI. Nothing I've seen so far has impressed me. Seems like there are a lot of onesie-and-twosie sized projects that take forever to ship anything and never hit critical mass; meanwhile, nothing really holds a candle to the design of Android/iOS.
After a short stint at HP, webOS is now owned by LG, they use it as the OS for their Home Entertainment (TVs, projectors,...) and nowadays also as an Automotive OS platform.
Open Source: https://www.webosose.org/
Unchecking it again hopefully does what you desire.
Obviously, they lacked in phone hardware and app selection, but basic experience was unmatched.
IIRC, Sailfish was inspired or derived from Maemo, so I wouldn't be surprised it took some great stuff with it.
Hitting the critical mass is tricky without having hundreds of millions to lose before you "validate" your experiment: Nokia was at that point with N9 release (to a wide acclaim in reviews too), but shifted right after that release fully to Microsoft Windows straight to their demise.
Canonical pulled out quickly as well, and well, HP Pre 3 didn't even make it to the market (WebOS changed hands weeks before the release).
I actually used each of these phones for a couple of years, and that was so much smoother (OS-wise) than Android. Never used iOS for a longer period to make any claim there (though if I go by MacOS, it's much hype for nothing).
https://www.lg.com/global/mobility/media-center/press-releas...
I think the Librem 5's adaptation of Gnome looks like a decent touch friendly Linux OS these days. Haven't touched it in a while though.
I have worked Sailfish before, so I know what to expect. while a great OS, it is hard to compete with the established market. even the inclusion of libhybris won't change that... as in that case, why not just buy an Android device. unfortunately privacy is a niche to tailor to
I vaguely remember there was an India specific phone running Sailfish as well, but by that time my company was no longer working with mobile applications.
We ported several proprietary telco Linux tools to Jolla but it turned out using a laptop with a 3G dongle was more convenient than a tiny low res screen (big surprise).
I’m not sure why they’ve limited themselves to Europe, probably because of support costs. Pity, Sailfish was ahead of the curve on many aspects, especially the swipe from the side UI pattern which showed up years later in IOS.
Note: I have worked a lot on MeeGo and Maemo before this. I only had Sailfish running on my N950s, so can't judge the final devices. Wish I could ...
It is kind of expected, given the budget of Nokia ... But even some of the design and aesthetic choices of Sailfish don't really age well once the novelty wears off
Frankly I’m surprised that they have survived this long.
The biggest obstacle to greater adoption is the lack of availability outside of the EU; of course, this is easy to work around...
It has a 'killer feature': Android App Support (https://jolla.com/appsupport), which enables a SFOS device to run Android apps in a sandbox.
I would also love to see a carefully engineered photo app...
Some people also don't like it that they had some deal with the Russian Government.
"In 2024, to escape Russia's investors due to the Ukrainian war, the Jolla initial company filed for bankruptcy, continuing its activity under the JollyBoys name." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolla)
Quite a gutsy move, in my opinion, and as far away from "near scam" as can be.
However it's interesting that a Finnish company files bankruptcy and had that much investors from Russia, so thanks for a additional point....and that name JollyBoy...
AFAIK russian military uses the devices during the war and moreover, they are designed and approved by the russian government. I saw a few devices from https://auroraos.ru/ . https://www.tadviser.ru/index.php/%D0%9F%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B4%D... - here is more history
Edit: looks like a non-free OS indeed. The developer tools just seem to include an SDK. It's a pass for me.
I don’t know if it’s the same now, because 12 years or more of fighting the duopoly with no cash to speak of in comparison must have meant selling your soul somewhat, but I doubt it’s the intent to do anything shady.
Android (in popular use) tends to have a lot of closed source bits, though I agree that it should be entirely open source. I would guess that not having it straight FOSS is more a function of financials and headcount to be good stewards than it is of ill-intent.
Definitely ambitious, and an achievement, for a small company tackle OS, hardware, dev experience, everything.
Issues aside it was a beautifully designed device, you could see real innovation. Unfortunately Nokia killed it before it even shipped.
I think I was expecting Jolla to be a close N9 successor, but I couldn't get over their UI/UX style and switched to Android soon after.
* Presumably contains many former engineers from that company;
* From a free democratic EU state, not somewhere untraceable and not governed by Western laws;
* As a European product enjoys more legal privacy protection and security than either American or many Asian vendors.
Those are the ones that spring to mind.
I looked at the libhybris page and a few other sources, but am unsure how much of Android is implied when using libhybris. Random person on Internet claimed it is a minimal, but complete, Android user space install, but my reading of the libhybris page doesn't seem to imply that. The libhybris page does imply some of Android user space. A (probably out of date) Android kernel with all the OOT binary blob drivers Android is famous for, seems like it would also be a requirement.
Am I misunderstanding how bad this is? Or, is Sailfish rather than being a real alternative to Android just helping to entrench the terrible situation with Android Linux kernels?
If you run SailfishOS you have to first have Android flashed onto the phone. They use the same kernel, camera drivers, GPU drivers, etc as the original OEM including the prorprietary wireless BLOBs and the Android Radio-Interface-Layer ("RIL").
I've spoken to the Sailfish guys awhile back and I get why they did this -- 10+ years ago there was basically no choice but to use the Android port of drivers + the Linux kernel the vendor shipped because there was no other way to make these hardware pieces work, thanks to the silicon vendors.
The story of not needing BLOBs and things like a libhybris-shim has slowly improved, but not 100% . We can run Debian linux on the Qualcomm Snapdragon laptop devices (Thinkpad X13s, etc) but bits and pieces are still not there (audio, full power management, Bluetooth, etc).
To current Qualcomm's credit there are people inside who are pushing for everything mainline Linux, and minimizing proprietary pieces.
Ubuntu Touch relies on libhybris as well.
If something doesn't work in the binary android drivers, the vendor won't help you (we support only android, sir). Nor can you fix the drivers yourself, because you don't have the sources or the knowledge how drivers work.
The android app would not get an accurate fix unless a Sailfish app first woke up the GPS and obtained an accurate lock.
There's also the HackBerry cyberdeck with Pi Zero 2W and original BB keyboard, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41138701 & https://github.com/ZitaoTech/Hackberry-Pi_Zero
You can't simply give up every popular app for a system nobody else uses or develops for.
Sailfish has Android emulation, but good luck running banking apps without Google SafetyNet. Even pure Android ROMs, like LineageOS, can't do that.
Also good luck with proprietary firmware for mobile networking and cameras. Another thing that usually holds back AOSP distributions, and will likely be even worse in a non-Android system.
If Samsung or Huawei or probably even Motorola decided to ditch Android and go all in on Sailfish, we'd see support for apps in short order. But as a third party OS you have to install yourself, it's basically dead in the water.
What BlackBerry did before giving up was a smart approach, they basically just converted Android apps to BlackBerry ones for you. And that'd be a fast way to get bootstrapped. They just didn't have enough steam left in them, sadly.
They had enough apps in the same way 640k of RAM was enough for everyone.
I think it's a fantastic topic, but to be succinct: we couldn't get app makers to keep parity between iOS and android, including banks, government and transportation apps for a very long time.
Assuming it would go easier with a random 3rd OS where "I'm sued for illegal deals" Google has struggled so much doesn't sound realistic.
It pretty much was, for almost everyone, for quite a few years.
They didn't evolve, took the iPhone as a joke, and when finally playing catch-up, the hardware was awful.
If they'd have seen the writing on the wall and responded in kind, I think we'd have all three players around today.
Nokia...I don't even want to talk about. I'm still half convinced it was a sabotage job.
https://www.historyvshollywood.com/reelfaces/blackberry/
There is no way for a viewer to know which parts are real or fake, so watching it is not going to help educate.
The Blackberry Storm sold 500,000 units in its first month and 1 million units by January 2009.[15] However, Verizon had to replace almost all of the one million Storm smartphones sold in 2008 due to issues with the SurePress touch screen [16] and claimed $500 million in losses.
To elaborate - Nokia innovated a lot. But internally Nokia was chaotic. They were Google, before Google got the reputation for creating projects only to kill them when they had hardly started.
Couple this with the absolute dictatorship that the Symbian division had over what they were releasing as a cellular device, and Meego/Maemo never had a chance. Up till the N900 the Maemo division was blocked from having cellular. After the N900 it was too late really. They clambered to make the N9, but it was at the breaking point and so they did the burning memo thing. The N9 was basically the blueprint for the Windows Phone models Nokia released.
Sailfish is a successor of this actual MeeGo work that was done and therefore had an uphill battle. They never got the same traction as Maemo (or even Mer), so I never called this a successor of Nokia's work. Nokia created a community with developer conferences and handing out devices. Jolla couldn't do this ... and therefore remained niche.
Perhaps the solution for such a phone is to make PWAs feasible for every kind of app?
I guess it would need a few essential built-in apps (something like an Apple Health analog) but hopefully the rest could be web apps with extra privileges, if needed and approved by the user.
Is geofencing already possible with PWAs? I.e. location based events? If not, that would also have to be a builtin (helper) app.
Everyone just agreed that it is fine if certificates are no longer used for web apps (even with a fully standardized pkcs#12 tokens), everyone just agreed that bank is using some non-standard otp generator, everyone just agreed with everything. Now you will soon have to pay heating in car on monthly basis.
Stop agreeing. Start complaining. Now and you.
Sailfish on Sony Xperia 10 works like a charm, with working things that even modded roms are having issue with.
If you fight it back... I am running my banking app (that they have even if they also have a web based app) for 4 years now without any issues, they did a major rewrite in between, but quite frankly in most of cases Safety-net is just a bunch of sand into eyes of security, if implemented right it might have impact but at the end most of banking banks are reducing it to if statement (that i patched).
Yep, true that normal user cant do this, but this is users call. Complain to financial ombudsman, complain to the bank, demand a way for you to authenticate if you are paying for the product, complain bank supporting phone monopoly etc.
Harass developers that decided to verify if phone is rooted, prove in media that they are just a bunch of kids having a boner on security they don't understand (which is a huge fact in all annoying login schemes, from mail to sms etc., OTP was more than enough (sms... giggling... ss7 access on tor for 500 dollars monthly)
Actually you are addressing wrong problem. It starts somewhere else, when you want to use Bluetooth hardware that has a custom app to use it and you cant use it on Sailfish while you cant use it in Android layer as there is no bluetooth pass-trough. Here I vote with my wallet, not buying such devices and waiting for Sailfish to implement it.
Messaging support depends on the protocol. Very good for Telegram, good for Matrix and Signal.
Lots of people use e.g. WhatsApp through the Android emulation layer.
I think there is a possible exception here.
I mean, firstly, yes, sadly this is largely true.
I had a Blackberry Passport, a beautiful handset running the QNX-based BB X OS. Over a year of ownership it gradually got less and less useful as app vendors turned off BB X support. No FB IM, no Whatsapp, and I have a phone that won't let me text with 90% of the most-contacted people on my phone.
And in those days (2014-2015) I did much less with my phone than now.
But I also own 2 little-used tablets.
I use tablets for watching films and TV, reading books, occasionally email. I don't do any of the mobile-phone stuff on my tablets, and they do not have SIM cards in them.
I would have as much use for a FOSS-powered tablet as I do for an Android or iOS tablet.
Poor patchy phone support does not cut it, sadly, and that's more than doubly so without apps.
But good support for at least one currently-available cheap Chinese tablet would be of legitimate interest to me.
Doesn't most banks have a mobile version of their website. Maybe not the best but it could be a good compromise.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/19/24181214/eu-chat-control
And many banks stopped providing hardware tokens as well because it's too expensive.
Unless you explicitly sign for Mobile-only bank (neobanks are weird) you will be able to get hardware token.
Speaking from German, UK and Polish experience.
This has to be a predominantly American problem, right?
I cannot imagine a cohort of Australian, Asian, New Zealand, British and European continental users noping out of an app because not cheque enabled.
My own bank does not even use 2FA. I log in using the officiel state sponsored digital ID (yes, without having a smartphone). This is in Denmark.
(sorry about the new anon account, it's been so long since I posted I've forgotten my old account. Perhaps I should use a PW mgr...)
Not all countries have caught up yet, but you can expect that to change within a few years.
PlayIntegrityFix I hear
The Android App support is good, I use Whatsapp and Signal with it, also Firefox and DuckDuckGo browser. Just keep in mind that the Android App support is to get a few apps running that are important to you. Choosing Sailfish also means choosing mostly native apps. The system browser is built on the Firefox engine. SSH support is lovely though. It feels just like desktop Linux.
Don't expect a super slick experience. Companies like Apple and Google are pooring billions into their mobile OS. A small comapny like Jolla cannot keep up with that. Also the Android drivers are as is, the Jolla developers cannot improve on them.
Edit: by the way, it uses Firejail to have apps locked into their own jail.
At the time it was very close to desktop GNU/linux OSes: software in rpm packages, wayland, pulse audio, easy SSH to device. It was easy. I still find myself confused when using Android, Sailfish OS was easy.
Older one plus devices, Motorola devices. The guy who ports to some Motorola phones simply doesn't give up and keeps maintaining his ports up to date.
Here's the status of various devices:
I was asking about Plasma Mobile ( https://plasma-mobile.org/get/ ) that the parent mentioned switching to and I wasn't aware that libhybris is a requirement.
https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices
There maintainers create configurations for those specific devices to make them work well with postmarket OS:
https://gitlab.com/postmarketOS/pmaports/-/blob/master/devic...
Part of this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41754074 [We need a real GNU/Linux (not Android) smartphone ecosystem]
It has some fantastic native & open indie applications, see https://openrepos.net.
If it managed to attract some extra users and gain a critical mass, it could become a credible (niche) alternative. It's nearly there.
But mostly it was (2): on my daily driver phone I need to be connected 100% of the time, things like the Android networking silently failing were a major problem.
The Sailfish guys for some odd reason decide to invent their own "user interactions" where you click-slide ("one handed") to do certain opertaions. This makes the UI not only awkward, but NOT intuitive. You don't know what your options are until you perform this strange operation. I get why they did this, it was a way to potentially reduce swiping, etc but now that we have phones with big screens, you can actually put those options in one UI.
Further, basic things like composing a text and attaching a photo requires a round-trip to the photo app where you 'tag' the images you want ONE BY ONE rather than being able to do this inline from the SMS/MMS application. I think this has gotten better recently but for a long time it was SUPER awkward.
Two other perplexing points was how SLOW the UI felt for what should have been compiled Qt code and poor battery life on the older Xperia devices. Maybe they're using QML and it's not compiled?
The Sailfish guys have what I think is an ugly looking UI as well.
They've "dithered" certain parts of the UI so it really looks like old-school EGA/CGA graphics, even though the display is high-DPI and they have what's effectively a TUI style interface.
The only people I know who "LOVE" or claim "it's the best" UI are the same ones who LOVE Zune and Windows Phone UIs which are basically flat UI, almost monocolor nearly TUI type which is what you see pieces of in Win10 as well. Personally I dislike this UI and so do many people I know, there's a reason why UIs have icons and ideally text labels. TUIs have their place but so do GUIs.
If the Sailfish guys abandoned their weird UI ideas and frankly made it more like iOS or Android (I know, so boring, we have to re-invent the wheel just because...) it would actually be compelling.
On the very very plus side of Sailfish, as someone else pointed out, it's basically a GNU/Linux device that uses RPMs. I was able to install dnsmasq, set up DNS based adblock filtering, curate firewall rules and basically harden the device. You could SSH into the device via USB without adb stupidity and once I set it up, it stayed working until the VOLTE switch-over occured.
I think Ubuntu Touch has a better "UI" (I've also run this) but the Ubuntu guys have basically been ignoring VOLTE and since all major US carriers have switched over to VOLTE, your phone basically can't really make calls now on Ubuntu Touch (but that's OK, they've improved a bunch of other stuff! /sarcasm off).
Ubuntu Touch (not that you asked) is also a LOT slower than it should be and because the Ubuntu Touch guys are pursuing an 'Over the Air' update model, since the OS can basically be overwritten, applications aren't actually unpacked at install time but dynamically at run time. On a desktop this is OK but on a phone it leads to very slow app loading times.
I have high hopes for the current batch of Linux phone projects, Mobian, postmarketOS, etc but sadly I'm on Android until these are fully solidified.
I actually bought a Sony Xperia 10 and sail fish because I wanted the UI back so bad, but unfortunately I have some apps which didn't seem to work with android emulation (mainly banking...)
No doubt Meego innovated on ideas, but just because they came up with something doesn't make it "good" and just because Apple/Google copied it doesn't prove the validity of the idea.
To that point I would prefer we used more screen real estate (Android, iOS, whatever) and REDUCED the usage of gestures, it would end up being faster. It sometimes takes me multiple attempts to swipe from the bottom on a Android/iOS to get it to do something because I have a screen protector and/or case and the way I'm interacting the with the device is different than the developers who might have worked with a "nude" device.
The screen protector/case issue made UI navigation even worse on Sailfish devices because you had to use this gesture inside a program, not just to switch between applications.
Ubuntu Touch also has a swipe, but from the side where a screen protector is slightly less likely to affect it's ability to register the gesture.
It's also more consistent gestures experience than sailfish. Here you know the gestures are basically for "window/app management". Everything else - they look like regular Android apps.
If you have an old Motorola, OnePlus, older Xiaomi Devices - you can get the community ported Sailfish OS. That won't have their Android app support, but there are other options to get that working.
https://github.com/sailfishos-open/waydroid
There were also rpms of Alien Dalvik (the official Android app runner on paid Sailfish devices) that you can install. But that's kind of piracy.
Wonder how well this integrates with the (edit: Sailfish) OS. Unfortunately, this also does not do screenlocks and therefore has security restrictions and certain apps refuse to work properly.
Other integrations could include making sure your contacts between Android and Sailfish are in sync.
Not sure what the status of notifications is.
Keeping the clipboards in sync.
Half of these things can be "hacked into" by using something like kde connect in the waydroid container.
Integration with Android intents like share etc .. would be stretching it..
It'd still be nice to do it properly.
Is this even a proper Linux phone? What distribution is it?
> Available for supported Sony Xperia™ devices.
So not very useful for other devices. /s