SailfishOS: A Linux-based European alternative to dominant mobile OSes

There was a blog post committing to refunds given sufficient cashflow, posted in 2017:

https://blog.jolla.com/summer-2017-ceo-update/>

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14637748>

It does appear that Jolla has shipped other products (SailfishOS, the Jolla Phone in 2013, some tablets, and others, see Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolla#Sailfish_OS_products>).

Since 2017 the company has gone through bankruptcy and re-launched.

It should be remembered that kickstarter / crowdfunded ventures, as with any other, are speculative and risky. A good-faith effort to deliver on spec is itself credible, and the landscape is littered with the husks of far more failures, especially in the mobile space, including from former (and current) giants: RIM, Palm, Microsoft, Mozilla, Canonical, off the top of my head). Google and Apple are the only present significant OS options standing, Apple (again) and Samsung dominate hardware, though there's increasing competition largely from China.

PS: I'm rather sure Jolla never emulated Android.

- It is not for everyone. Some Linux experience and willingness to tinker with it is helpful.

- Despite the many limitations, I love the UI, the spirit, the platform, and the community. I fear the day where I have to switch to a different OS.

- Many Android apps can be run via the AlienDalvik/AppSupport middleware. However, raw BLE is not supported. Thus, most e-scooter apps won't work. My banking app runs okay-ish.

- Google Play Store and Google Play Services can be installed by following non-trivial tutorials. I don't use them.

- The hardware abstraction layer that makes proprietary Android drivers work with SailfishOS is cool.

- QML and C++/Python/JS allow for easy, rapid app development. The custom widgets have a unique, consistent, simple style.

- As most of the UI is written in QML, it is possible to adjust and extend most of the UI shell and the base applications just by editing these resource files on the phone. For example, one can add additional widgets to the lock screen or change animation speeds.

- A nice tool, Patch Manager allows transparently and reversibly applying such modifications. This is so cool, even though the patches often have to be adapted for each major OS version.

- Jolla, the Finnish company behind SailfishOS is tiny and had to let go a lot of engineers and supporting staff a few years ago. Development has slowed down significantly.

- There are about two dozen very active developers in the community who write awesome apps. There are native clients for Discord (no voice/video), Signal, Telegram, Slack, Mastodon, Hacker News, etc.

- Unfortunately, the browser is stuck with outdated Gecko (despite heroic efforts by a developer who upgraded it from ESR 78 to ESR 91 [1]).

- Only a few smartphones are supported by SailfishOS - either officially supported by Jolla (e.g., some Sony phones and some Jolla-branded ones) or supported via community ports. Often the hardware support is a little bit buggy.

EDIT: of course, if you visit the forums, you will see quite some criticism of Jolla - and some of it is well deserved. It would be great if there were better hardware, fewer bugs, better support for Android apps, etc. Personally, I feel that Jolla is really trying to make SailfishOS better but that they lack really stable sources of income and have made some less-than-ideal decisions in hindsight. The best solution would be to get EU funding for stabilizing the platform and finding a business model that generates recurring income from large organizations. Selling to private customers without being able to extract recurring income and being dependent on badly-documented hardware is not going to work.

[1] https://www.flypig.co.uk/?to=gecko&list_id=975&list=gecko

For some people the downsides are lack of apps. The few Android apps I use work just fine with the current hardware. Sadly I still have to use WhatsApp for a while, but for Signal there is a native app, WhisperFish.

The main thing to me is that SailfishOS is a Linux on your pocket. You can ssh into it, sync stuff with rsync or syncthing, edit your stuff with vim, have cron do stuff, or what ever you like. My old phones I use as remote sensors now.

There was a point that I tried to switch to iPhone. I struggled for a long time to get on par with the usability that I had with SFOS. I came pretty close, but the card house of different apps I had to build was pretty unreliable.

My phone is also my wifi hotspot. If I turn on vpn on my phone, then all the traffic from every connected device goes via vpn. I couldn't get iPhone to do this.

The team behind SailfishOS is pretty small, and regrettably shows in many areas. But still for me the clear winner of these three. It's not for everyone, but if you know your way around Linux it's great :)

So, not an Android or iPhone killer, but a good solid platform. The newest version 5.0.0.71 came out just a few days ago.