Posted by ForHackernews 2 days ago
I don't know if the values and leadership at Jolla have changed since then, but it's not a company that I would trust to deliver and communicate honestly in good faith.
AFAIK they have bought by some other company (again) since then, but they have basically nothing. Most of their Sailfish OS is actually closed source (like AOSP vs all the apps from Google), they don't have any hardware, they just re-flash some phone from Sony.
I had high hopes for them, but now wouldn't even touch them with a stick. Pixel with GrapheneOS seems to be a much better choice and maybe even closer to their original ideologies.
On a more superficial front, the UI is far ahead of both iOS and Android. Complaining about it being closed-source misses the point: the platform is Linux, and other than the proprietary front-end, everything else in Sailfish is wide open to hacking and independent development. So there's that too...
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.
That's not an argument for not complaining against what was done, but given what they're doing - fighting two Goliaths that have 10000x the resources, I just wish people would give them another chance.
My impression was that this platform was only becoming less and less viable. Other problems: it's proprietary and only really runs well on any phone you've ever heard of if it's on top of an Android kernel with some kind of hardware abstraction layer.
https://docs.sailfishos.org/Support/Supported_Devices/
It is not using Android kernel - it uses a Linux kernel with android features enabled and compile time & runs Android binary drivers for hardware that has no native Linux driver via a binary adaptation layer called libhybris (also used by some Ubuntu Touch devices).
The Android emulation layer nowadays runs in a container that talks to the Android bits in the kernel and to the blobs via libhybris.
Now it's up to capricious EU leadership whether to support a sovereign OS, including mandating that banks and other institutions open up their requirements to use solely US-controlled devices.
They also recently split the automobile UI part off from the Phone bits. That joint work was part of the problem for FOSSing everything, since they have deals with Car manufacturers which depend on their IP.
P.S. unless there is a sailfish browser that ships separately with a different OS and I’m remembering that.
P.P.S. I would love a Linux phone that lets me take calls and has mobile data, wifi, web browsing and GPS/navigation. I don’t care about apps other than navigation. AFAIK there is not currently something that fits the bill and works out of the box.
I don’t have any first-hand experience but from the comment that linked that blog, and the site itself, it’s not clear whether the browser engine has been updated since…
1. https://www.flypig.co.uk/?to=gecko&list_id=975&list=gecko
This is also why you see Chome being used as a core in all kinds of applications and frameworks - AFAIK it has the necessary API for this.
There are dozens of functional mobile OSes. And OS isn’t useful unless it has application support for the tasks people want to accomplish, though.
Europe has none of the 3.
I mean, I have to write exit strategies from Azure because the EU might demand our industry to leave non-EU infra. Yet ironically the digital company ID I would need to sign new contracts with within Europe aren't available without one of the two app stores. It's not that I can't sign those contracts without the ID, but I'd probably have to go to Germany in person.
That means you can't run just any linux software on it.
Yeah, with GUIs thats a different story...