As someone who cut their teeth on Maemo (the N800/N900 still live in my basement) and carried the first Jolla dev device, I like to pull out my SailfishOS phones every few months to see how things are progressing. Here’s where I’m at in September 2025.
↫ Nick Schmidt
I was one of the very first people to review the original Jolla Phone way back in 2014, and I also happen to own the quite rare Jolla Tablet, so I was definitely a serious backer and believer in the platform back when it first entered the market. Sadly, the pace of improvements was slow, and failed adventures and mismanagement eventually led to the platform almost dying out. It’s only in recent years that they’ve been back on track and Sailfish OS is a more serious option again, but reading through Nick Schmidt’s findings, it seems the same problems still haunt the platform.
And we all know what the main problem will be: application availability. In your day-to-day use, you’re going to be spending a lot of time using the Android compatibility layer, because native Sailfish applications simply don’t pull their weight. This leads to the age-old problem of any operating system that loses focus on native applications and opts to go all-in on compatibility layers or ports instead, and int he case of Sailfish that means: why run Sailfish to run Android applications poorly, when you can also just run Android? And why develop native applications, when your Android build can run using the compatibility layer? OS/2 (with Windows applications) and Haiku (with Qt/GTK applications) suffer from the same problem.
Apparently, the Jolla C2 phone is not exactly great either, and doesn’t showcase Sailfish properly, and Sailfish’s keyboard is still unpleasant to use, a problem I also had in my original review so many years ago. There are some bright spots, too; the swipe-based navigation is still great, and apparently Wi-Fi connectivity is much more stable now. Still, it seems like Sailfish is suffering from more or less exactly the kind of problems you’d expect a small platform to suffer from, and whether or not you can deal with those problems is a more a question of dedication than just altering some use patterns.
Android and iOS, though illegal practices, have sucked all the air out of the room, and I doubt we’re ever going to get any of it back.
If they want Sailfish to succeed they need to release a new phone at least each 12-18 months.
This was what spoiled an otherwise phenomenal experience I had with the Blackberry Passport. The hardware was absolutely perfect, and BBOS was amazing for what it was, but I simply had to use the Android app store to be able to use it as a daily driver. Ultimately, with the demise of BBOS I was forced to go back to boring slabs.
Morgan,
I prefer the physical keyboards too. In some ways technology has regressed. Data entry on glass slabs remains highly inefficient and misclicks can be annoying too. Still, glass slabs are more “futuristic” and cheaper to produce, so they won. The same could happen to cars – replace all tactile controls with touchscreens – if regulators don’t step in over safety concerns, It’s also happening to major appliances where interfaces are built into a slab of class rather than having discrete controls. My main gripe with these is that when they break, the whole thing may become garbage that isn’t worth fixing since repair parts & labor can cost as much as buying a new unit.
That thing has a cult following. I mean, why? Apart from the incredible keyboard/touch pad combo allowing me to just swing around text making wilful edits all while scrolling my main text and so on. Hell, I could actually type on it while looking elsewhere. The screen “gestures” for app switch/”home” are common now but just worked (they had this in the PlayBook). The 7 color LED notifier so I could put my friends/lovers/family in, say, purple and boring stuff in green, super important is red. Or the real head phone jack, memory card and so on.
I had to let it go in the end. After a few years of software rot it became increasingly difficult to even visit websites without add root certs and the like and, well, that smack of effort – it is just a phone. I joined the Cult of Apple and I still curse this f’n touch keyboard daily.
As opposed to operating systems like BeOS and Windows Phone that had no compatibility layers to run apps intended for other OSes and were commercial successes because developers rushed to develop native apps for their single-digit market share installed base… oh, never mind, that never happened.
Especially when it came to Windows Phone, Microsoft shovelled a ton of money into the combustion chamber of that little train that couldn’t (paying developers like Gameloft to port games), and it still was an OS with a poor app ecosystem.
Meanwhile, I can point to at least two OSes that benefitted greatly from the ability to run apps intended for other OSes: Initial versions of MacOS X (capable of running Classic MacOS apps, which was a completely different OS despite the branding) and Steam OS.
The secret?
– The experience was/is reasonably polished
– The OS offered a genuine value proposition compared to the OS whose apps it runs.
Which brings me to Jolla: As an Android user, what is the value proposition for me? Jolla goes for the same “open-source with proprietary bits” arrangement that Android 2.2 had (my first Android version). I’ve been burned by this arrangement before, and I know I will be burned by this arrangement again in the oft chance Jolla becomes reasonably successful. They already had the nerve to charge a €25 yearly subscription despite charging you for the device and despite keeping the OS semi-proprietary, so I ask again: What is the value proposition for me?
Ubuntu Touch had it planned. Convergence. If someone does this reasonably well it can have a change.
I had an N810, then an N9 as my first smartphone, then got a used Nexus 5 since it was one of the few devices that could run MeeGo. When it died I bought a Sony Xperia X since it was supported by Sailfish OS but I never got around to actually switching it off the Android install it came with. (I also had a Planet Computers Gemini PDA, but I don’t remember ever managing to get Sailfish to work on it and it was too big for me to use as my phone although it was a fun palmtop for a while… and then the battery expanded and replacing it wasn’t worth it for how little use I was getting out of it.)
As mentioned in the article, I do remember the gestures system feeling better than Android’s version. But the main thing I miss is the unified messaging. Since the default chat client used https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telepathy_(software) messaging people on different protocols was transparent. I could see a single chat history for a contact that blended SMS (… MMS support wasn’t great; hopefully that has been fixed), XMPP (Google Talk), and even AIM (uh, this was a long time ago). There was no concept of needing to install another app to chat with people using a different service; you install the client for the service and it seamlessly appears in the same UI. Google and Apple could have done the same, but they wanted to push their own chat protocols, which mainly actually ended up benefiting Meta, since it means a lot of people use FB Messenger and WhatsApp and for many users there’s a lot of resistance to installing yet another chat app.
(On my current Android phone, this is “solved” since I *mostly* use Signal, but I have some contacts still on SMS/MMS/RCS and also occasionally use Discord DMs.)
I think SailfishOS works quite well with self-hosted software and should continue down this path, alongside being a choice for data sovereignity, While in the consumer space it wouldn’t achieve non-geek market share, they could promote themselves as a serious solution for businesses that want security and no US Big Tech involvement.
This also means that they could focus on connecting to a few major APIs in this space instead of chasing apps for various random services that at some point will no longer work.
For example, my Xperia Plus (besides being a lovely phone with a huge 21:9 display) can connect perfectly to my self-hosted instances of Nextcloud & Jellyfin, has fine e-mail, podcast & ebook support and a Signal client, all without touching the Android layer.
I can’t use it as my only phone due to the poor camera (something which is the case for all the officially supported Xperias & Jolla’s own offerings), all the native navigation options are terrible and one would have to check that their banking app is compatible with the Android support, but these are the only 3 showstoppers from my point of view. “Social media” is a shithole anyway (and the Android apps do work for that), but the fact that after all these years there is no polished OpenStreetMaps client on any platform is a real shame and the insistence on not using A-GPS for privacy reasons leads to a mid-90s geolocation experience, which I don’t think is tolerable. Camera-wise, they really need to offer a phone with working OIS, I can live without the post-processed “faux-tography” crap, but no OIS means you’re not taking any decent picture in anything other than perfect sunshine. The Nexus 5 had OIS eons ago, WTF.
The EU should heavily invest in Jolla so that they can expand their team, partner officially with a decent phone manufacturer like Fairphone and come out with a proper offering both hardware & software-wise. The level of investment required for this is pocket change for the EU, but would mean that, at least for work, citizens could use a non-Big Tech phone and couldn’t have their accounts disabled at the whim of the US. This and a major public cloud offering really need to be a priority for the EU tech-wise.