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

81–90 of 142 posts

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

#81

Post by TeMPOraL »

dingo_bat wrote: post #70
fjsolwmv wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about Lineage and rooting your phone? https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/

1. Installing Lineage degrades many hardware features. For example, the camera will never be as good as it is on the official OS. This is what I meant by "open source drivers". Currently all of this stuff is binary blobs, which aren't even available freely. So it is impossible for Lineage to fully utilize the hardware. 2. Rooting presents another extremely stupid problem. Apps like Netflix and snapchat and many payme…

> 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 without you knowing". Rooting your phone breaks that last guarantee.

- Payment/banking: CYA. You have root, some evil "hacker" might "hack" your phone and steal your money, and we don't want to get sued for that.

It's very much user hostility, created by a conflict of interest between the company making the product, and the users of that product.

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

#82

Post by [deleted] »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #81
dingo_bat wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Installing Lineage degrades many hardware features. For example, the camera will never be as good as it is on the official OS. This is what I meant by "open source drivers". Currently all of this stuff is binary blobs, which aren't even available freely. So it is impossible for Lineage to fully utilize the hardware. 2. Rooting presents another extremely stupid problem. Apps like Netflix and snapchat and many payme…

> 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…

[deleted]

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

#83

Post by [deleted] »

dingo_bat wrote: post #70
fjsolwmv wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about Lineage and rooting your phone? https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/

1. Installing Lineage degrades many hardware features. For example, the camera will never be as good as it is on the official OS. This is what I meant by "open source drivers". Currently all of this stuff is binary blobs, which aren't even available freely. So it is impossible for Lineage to fully utilize the hardware. 2. Rooting presents another extremely stupid problem. Apps like Netflix and snapchat and many payme…

[deleted]

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

#84

Post by fisian »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #81
dingo_bat wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Installing Lineage degrades many hardware features. For example, the camera will never be as good as it is on the official OS. This is what I meant by "open source drivers". Currently all of this stuff is binary blobs, which aren't even available freely. So it is impossible for Lineage to fully utilize the hardware. 2. Rooting presents another extremely stupid problem. Apps like Netflix and snapchat and many payme…

> 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.

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

#86

Post by dman »

Nition wrote: post #78
fjsolwmv wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keeping money for not delivered product, while spending cash on other parts of the business, sounds like fraud.

That isn't really how it went down, at least as far as I could tell following their updates from the outside. It seemed more like they ran out of money entirely, and their options were either give up completely and no-one gets anything, or keep working on Sailfish OS to hopefully get new business going, then make a profit in the future that they can use to pay tablet backers back. And they have been paying backers ba…

I dont look at the situation as charitably. They raised $2,571,262 (479% funded) and spent more than half of it on Sailfish, while running out of funds such that they never shipped the tablets.

The tablets themselves were manufactured by their Chinese partner and even sold on third party Chinese websites. Funders never got their tablets, but other customers were able to buy the same tablets for below what Jolla had sold them.

Jolla was accepting orders until the very end before they decided to come out and cancel the whole tablet effort.

They have since raised over 12M dollars but ostensibly that is not enough to repay the 2.5M they raised initially.

I have no insights into their engineering or technology since I never got to use their product, but as far as business practices go they have constantly scraped the bottom of the barrel.

If you have some spare cycles go check out the comments on the indiegogo page (https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/jolla-tablet-world-s-firs...)

EDIT - https://reviewjolla.blogspot.com/2017/06/financial-news-joll... claims they have raised 70M USD.

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

#87

Post by realusername »

rqs wrote: post #71
jasonkostempski wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"parts of the UI stayed closed source" If anything is closed, except drivers they'd likely be forced to accept binaries for, I wouldn't even consider the OS. Who do they think their target audience is? I imagine most people looking into an alternative mobile OS are well aware of the slippery cliff that is proprietary software. It's the whole point of looking around. I'm looking for full control so I don't get stuck w…

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.

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

#88

Post by johnsea »

cfadvan wrote: post #50
dman wrote: post #24

I backed their tablet and was disappointed when I learned they would never ship it - Jolla's handling of the whole fiasco was very suboptimal. Pinning hopes on the purism now for a hackable mobile device.

Jolla had some profitable months last year and started issuing refunds to people who backed its tablet on Indiegogo. The company won't say how many are left, however. "It's not that many," Pienimäki claims. "Some of them are a bit noisy, but it's not really that many anymore." Jolla has promised to issue more refunds every time it has a profitable month. These, Pienimäki hopes, will happen at a "steady pace" by the e…

"a bit noisy" is still too nice to describe the few people which pollute each an every blog post with the same boring complaints. One shouldn't use Kickstarter when one doesn't understand the risk.

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

#89

Post by progval »

shmerl wrote: post #49
raimue wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Android compatibility layer is actually Alien Dalvik developed by Myriad. It is mostly used on set-top boxes for TVs. Jolla just licensed it for their phones. As far as I know, even on the latest Sailfish X, Alien Dalvik only supports the API level of Android 4.4 (2013).

It's really weird that supposedly open source Android runtime is so hard to actually run on proper Linux.

Not really. We can't run some Linux software on BSD either. (eg. Gnome, because it depends on systemd, which depends on Linux-specific features).

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

#90

Post by progval »

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.

Because the banking application would stop working for most users.
Post reply on HN