João Carrasqueira at XDA Developers has taken a look at the current state of Sailfish OS, and concludes:
As an idea, I love Sailfish OS. Not only does it bring a wholly unique interface to mobile devices at a time when things seem more unified than ever, but it also has the potential to bring the full power of Linux to a smartphone you actually want to use. But the lack of apps makes it hard for it to become anyone’s daily driver, and the power of Linux is somewhat hampered because it relies on dedicated repositories that, again, don’t get much support.
The community as a whole would benefit if the UI for Sailfish OS could also be open-sourced and made available as a desktop environment other distros could adopt. I can see a world where many more Linux distros might be ported to mobile devices using this UI, and leading to more apps being ported to the platform as well. It’s unlikely, but taking that step could make a big difference.
↫ João Carrasqueira
It seems like Sailfish OS, much like any other mobile operating system that isn’t Android or iOS, is still stuck in application hell, where they’ve always been. Windows Phone, BlackBerry 10, postmarketOS, Sailfish OS – they all suffer from the fact that the services and associated applications people actually need to use in their day-to-day life just simply aren’t there, and never will be unless something utterly drastic happens. You’re pretty much forced to fall back on possible Android application compatibility layers, at which point you’re basically just running Android in an worse way.
As an extremely early customer of the original Jolla Phone, and owner of the very rare Jolla Tablet, I considered if I should add the new Jolla Phone as an incentive for the current fundraiser, but I decided against it because I already know what the review is going to be like. Interesting user interface, very limited set of often buggy native applications, constant reliance on often buggy Android compatibility layer, €750 is a lot of money for a barely mid-range phone. Oh, and the UI layer is closed source.
I don’t need an expensive phone I won’t use after the review period to write any of that.
There’s very little new to write about or discover when it comes to mobile operating systems other than Android and iOS, and that’s not through the fault of the people developing these platforms. All the smart developers working on postmarketOS, Salfish, Ubuntu Touch, and others are doing a great job and the very best they can, but in the end these platforms are limited by the fact that the services we all depend on just do not work on any of them. I don’t have the solution for the problem – other than very heavy-handed regulation to demand open APIs, which I support but will never happen – so the status quo will remain as it is.
It’s a sad state of affairs when even Google-free Android is almost a non-starter at this point.
I would like to mention another option in Linux phone market: https://furilabs.com/
From what I gather online, it is quite a bit more polished than any other linux-based phones.
I’ve been daily driving a furilabs FLX1s for 4 months and it is the real deal. Haven’t used my old android phone since.
I’ve been seriously eyeing the FLX1s+. How is the app situation, do you have to lean heavily on the Android support?
I only use the android subsystem for an app (Hydrawise) to control my sprinklers as they have no web equivalent. Otherwise im using fractal (matrix), geary (email), chatty (texts), and firefox 95% of the time. With a user agent switcher for firefox, I can use websites for pretty much anything else, including teams and outlook for work.
Now its not perfect. Every now and then I have to force kill a stuck firefox on a misbehaving webpage. Or geary will need a restart because it quits fetching email. But the phone itself fast, the apps mostly just work, and as a 20+ year linux user who came from irix, its the first usable phone that truly feels like a ‘mobile computer’ to me.
I’m a proud user of sailfish since 6 or 7 years. As all is not only if there’re tons of apps, for me the most important things is that the native apps are free software, no ads, no tracks, no “bad behavior”. As user I feel respected, and the OS is a true linux with all the bells and whistles. And appsuport (the android compatibility layer) works better than expected. There aren’t native tiktok, X, whatsapp or bank apps but – for me – is the best OS for a phone
I can’t disagree with anything in the article here. But I’d add that it feels like the Linux phone ecosystem has grown over the last few years and is becoming an increasingly interesting place to be.
I’m consistently impressed with how much progress the distros and shells (PostmarketOS, Ubuntu Touch, Mobian, etc.; Phosh, Lomiri, Plasma Mobile, Sxmo, Lipstick, etc.) are making.
It feels like a very different world to Android and iOS (more user agency, less driven by commercial interest) and I’d love to see more of it covered on OSnews.
It also doesn’t help that the two biggest names for mobile Linux – Sailfish OS and Ubuntu Touch – have their own separate apps and repos and can’t just run normal desktop Linux apps, nor can their mobile apps just run on normal desktop Linux, nor can you run their apps on more “mainline” mobile Linux distributions like postmarketOS, or Mobian. So you end up having multiple silos of apps instead of having one big Linux app ecosystem that works across all distributions and form factors.
Sailfish supports flatpak and ubtouch snaps but “normal desktop apps” doesn’t fit well in a small touchscreen (small compared with a 20″ screen).
Also I don’t want applications in my phone that break the UI guidelines, run ub apps in sailfish (or viceversa) will make all inconsistent and amateurish.
I wish we’d live in the world steve jobs imagined 😀 (at least from what I know)
WebApps (now called PWAs) everywhere.
Would make things so much easier for alternative smartphone vendors/operating systems.
What I find genuinely depressing is that the Eurocrats talk a lot about digital sovereignty, but if you want to participate in society (have a job, interact with the government, get an ETA to travel to the UK, interact with your bank etc), you have to use apps available in either the App Store or the Play Store (and the Play Store version sometimes requires Play Services).
This tells you a lot about the quality of governance happening here in the EU.
It’s obvious that the Eurocrats are paying lip service to digital sovereignty and are waiting for the (unfriendly to the EU) Trump administration to go away once Trump’s second term is over, and they are so confident that the next US administration will be EU-friendly.
Let’s not forget about the banking apps present in the very EU-friendly Huawei App Gallery…but then again, if even Microsoft could not push a 3rd app ecosystem, I don’t think the EU will be able to.
What would be nice is an EU Android App Store + EU versions of some actually very necessary Google services like Firebase, without which notifications ain’t happening…but who would host the cloud services (and associated cost) for that? Huawei does it, but no EU company seems willing to.
I think they would just make their own version of Google Play Integrity anyways
HOLY CRAP THERE’S A NEW JOLLA PHONE COMING OUT??? I had no idea! 😀 I also got the first phone. I’m one of the few and proud that was using it in the US. I loved that phone.
But what killed my love for it was the change in the UI from SailfishOS 1 to 2. SailfishOS. The original UI was a masterpiece and I miss it. 🙁
contrary to the popular notion for MW the biggest issue with Sailfish is… its UI that heavily leans of features, which are just annoying and imprecise… even Android started adopting this crap and I’m diligently disabling it during setup of each device I use…
why does every article frame alternatives as application hell? Do you really need your bank app on your jolla? It contains all kinds of trackers, gps and other heuristics to “keep you safe”. (Banks retain 100% security interest, sorry you agreed to it as they are all registered as national associations to which you are a member, subject to policy, not laws) Do you need facebook? X? more trackers? convenience no…. at this stage of the “Great Game” anything convenient is stealing something from you…. per user agreement. AKA your consent…. I appreciate something different at the very least, lets stop recreating the same prison over and over.
Agreed. Whenever I see people using the term “daily driver” when talking about a mobile phone, I feel they are living in another universe than I am. In their universe it is normal to use such a device every single day. To me that seems crazy.
And those bank applications and so on are more experiments as long as they are so tied to specific platforms. People are dramatizing the consequences of living without iOS/Android.
Bank apps are anything but experiments. In my country most banks require you to use their app for 2FA and one bank I use requires you to install their app to open a bank account and do anything at all since they killed their web portal. The government also moved some bureaucracy to an app, though it seems it doesn’t use Play Integrity… yet. You can use another phone for banking apps for now but eventually every app will only run on an approved OS and the government might even ban you from the Internet if your phone has some weird OS.
The fact that there are banks that do not have a production-grade (based on published standards) mechanism to interact with them digitally does not make the remaining approach more than an experiment worth of one’s time.
Governments demanding specific authorized equipment for network access only happens in North Korea and I suspect even they are not demanding every single citizen to own such equipment.
I am quite sure that for the example you give, you can also call/visit/use a webpage to obtain said service. If not, it would seem crucial to start reverse engineering that application if it’s proprietary.
> Do you really need your bank app on your jolla?
If it were my “main” phone, then yes. Otherwise I can’t log into my banking on my PC as the banking app is also the 2FA app. I have other phones around, but I do not want to have my banking stuff on them (because they’re mostly for testing stuff)
I live in Brazil and we use Pix for payments. So I need a bank app for … pretty much anything.
Also, most banks here use the app as their 2FA, so anyway I need an app.
It’s really sad.. When I first got a smartphone, it was Android, I immediately rooted it, and I was extremely excited about this future of internet-connected computers that were actually capable.
Now… you need a smartphone to interact with the businesses that own us and our governments, and the smartphone is really theirs, not mine. At this point I use an iPhone because… whatever. The only reason I need a phone is to interact with my owners, and I have the easiest time getting something affordable that still runs well (used iPhone vs mediatek android is no contest), and iOS’s particular flavor of neutering keeps Arby’s or whatever other random company wanted 3¢ more profit from burning my leg as my phone overheats never going into sleep because the Arby’s and the dollar store’s app needs that wake lock to keep the data harvesting going. (Not to incriminate Arby’s; no idea if they specifically are the one doing it today, nobody knows about tomorrow)