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.
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.