Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Jolla is the last company with an 'alternative' mobile operating system

engadget.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 142 posts

Re: Jolla is the last company with an 'alternative' mobile operating system

#91

Post by skvark »

deanclatworthy wrote: post #11

It’s hardly an alternative. Having tried it twice, the gestures are completely alien to a new user and I gave up with our test device within an hour.

iPhone X introduced very similar gestures as seen on Sailfish OS (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208204). They might be a bit alien at first, but once you get used to them, they are in my opinion far more powerful (one-handed use), faster and more intuitive than buttons. I have used Sailfish OS based phones since 2013 as my daily driver and Android/iOS UX feels very clumsy to me.

Re: Jolla is the last company with an 'alternative' mobile operating system

#92

Post by maheart »

dzonga wrote: post #28

all I want to know can I run say the latest version of Firefox & WhatsApp on it ? I would love to support these guys

I can confirm that the latest WhatsApp works with the Jolla (Myriad) Android runtime. I'm using the older runtime that shipped with the original Jolla1 phone.

Re: Jolla is the last company with an 'alternative' mobile operating system

#93

Post by progval »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #32
confounded wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you were the Chinese or Russian government, would you rather trust Google or Apple with a camera and mic on all your employees? While I don’t personally like the policies of either government, if they throw money at FOSS, that’s still (probably, see Android) a good thing.

> While I don’t personally like the policies of either government, if they throw money at FOSS. Sailfish isn’t completely FOSS and the strategy of licensing it to clients like Rostelecom foresees that a lot of the OS will remain closed source.

It's still better than Android or iOS.

Besides, no government will actually check the whole OS themselves, so they have to trust some company at some point.

Re: Jolla is the last company with an 'alternative' mobile operating system

#94

Post by Vinnl »

dingo_bat wrote: post #53

Instead of an alternative OS, we need a company that will make good hardware (comparable to Samsung) and not lock down their android system and provide open source drivers. That will satisfy most tinkerers, since they can modify anything they want and even load their own images since the drivers are open source. Android as an OS is good enough. Just that every single manufacturer has opted to lock it down.

You definitely also have to care about reducing the use of conflict minerals and your environmental impact, but if you do, the Fairphone [0] provides most of that as an added bonus.

[0] https://www.fairphone.com

Re: Jolla is the last company with an 'alternative' mobile operating system

#95

Post by simonh »

realusername wrote: post #87
rqs wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about another angle: Android is Open Sourced and much powerful than SailfishOS. It's much easier for their target audiences to targeting Android than their OS.

> Android is Open Sourced Only partially, the ASOP does not run on anything because of the vast amount of blobs and basic drivers missing and people are maintaining open-source reimplementation of the gapps to make even the most basic apps working.

True of course, but: 1) Any other open source OS would have exactly the same problems. And 2) They wouldn’t be any easier for them to solve, so why not concentrate efforts an solving it on AOSP which already has an ecosystem?

Yours is an argument why all struggling OSS mobile OSes are struggling, not particularly why AOSP has problems. Surely if even AOSP is struggling to solve these issues, what chance do the others have?

Re: Jolla is the last company with an 'alternative' mobile operating system

#96

Post by pjmlp »

fisian wrote: post #84
TeMPOraL wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apps like Netflix and snapchat and many payments/banking apps will refuse to work. I cannot find a way to explain this except dev incompetency and/or hostility towards users. - Netflix: "we see you have root, we can no longer trust our DRM on your phone". - Snapchat: a service whose core principle was always, "you can send your nude photos to each other, the photos are ephemeral, and they won't be able to save them…

And why do these then work on desktop computer without checks like: Do you have the latest (windows) update installed? Do you have an Antivirus installed, which we approve of? etc. (I'm not referring to Snapchat but the banking things here) It seems to me that they never cared when on desktops and suddenly on mobiles there are all these problems.

On the desktop so far they haven't had a way to ensure that, beyond Apple and Microsoft sandboxing attempts, while on mobile the sandbox mechanisms are guaranteed unless one has an unofficial OS.

Re: Jolla is the last company with an 'alternative' mobile operating system

#97

Post by Vendan »

fisian wrote: post #84
TeMPOraL wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apps like Netflix and snapchat and many payments/banking apps will refuse to work. I cannot find a way to explain this except dev incompetency and/or hostility towards users. - Netflix: "we see you have root, we can no longer trust our DRM on your phone". - Snapchat: a service whose core principle was always, "you can send your nude photos to each other, the photos are ephemeral, and they won't be able to save them…

And why do these then work on desktop computer without checks like: Do you have the latest (windows) update installed? Do you have an Antivirus installed, which we approve of? etc. (I'm not referring to Snapchat but the banking things here) It seems to me that they never cared when on desktops and suddenly on mobiles there are all these problems.

They can't really check most of that stuff on desktop, as they are restricted to run inside the browser. That said, I'm sure some tried with ActiveX crap and such.

Re: Jolla is the last company with an 'alternative' mobile operating system

#98

Post by chupasaurus »

gue5t wrote: post #3

Companies providing operating systems is a clear conflict of interest. Evidence: the tragic state of the entire mobile ecosystem, where no hardware can be fully utilized by (or even make calls with) an open-source OS. This article also fails to mention Tizen. Has it been abandoned? It was absolutely terrible (millions upon millions of lines of the worst C code I've ever perused) but I thought it still existed, making…

Purism is making a phone on top of usual Linux distros (i.e. they are tinkering with Debian Buster on dev boards) with only open source drivers.

Re: Jolla is the last company with an 'alternative' mobile operating system

#99

Post by A2017U1 »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #23
shmerl wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the status of the browser? Before it was stuck with ancient Gecko, because IPC embedlite project basically died. What are they doing now about it? I wish they'd take something like Servo and browser.html for these purposes.

Latest Firefox Mobile LTS release still works on Jolla’s ancient Android version (through the Alien Dalvik compatibility layer). You can install it from F-Droid.

Firefox is not available on fdroid anymore. There's a fork called Fennec that brings it into line with fdroid policy. There's also Icecat.

To get Firefox without being forced into a Google account use Yalp installer.

Re: Jolla is the last company with an 'alternative' mobile operating system

#100

Post by xorcist »

A2017U1 wrote: post #99
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Latest Firefox Mobile LTS release still works on Jolla’s ancient Android version (through the Alien Dalvik compatibility layer). You can install it from F-Droid.

Firefox is not available on fdroid anymore. There's a fork called Fennec that brings it into line with fdroid policy. There's also Icecat. To get Firefox without being forced into a Google account use Yalp installer.

Firefox Klar, which is an official Mozilla project, is available on F-Droid. There's some added content blocking stuff but otherwise it's just Firefox.
Post reply on HN