Mobile Archive
I am pleased to announce a significant change in Mer and Sailfish OS which will be implemented in phases. As many of you know Mer began many years ago as a way for the community to demonstrate “working in the open” to Nokia. This succeeded well enough that Mer eventually closed down and shifted support to MeeGo. When MeeGo stopped – thanks to its open nature – we, Carsten Munk and I, were able to reincarnate Mer as an open community project and continue to develop a core OS and a suite of open development tools around it. Over time a number of organisations used the Mer core as a base for their work. However, there was one that stood out: Jolla with Sailfish OS which started to use Mer core in its core and they have been by far the most consistent contributors and supporters of Mer. Once again, Mer has served its purpose and can retire. To clarify that this will be the official ‘working in the open’ core of SailfishOS we’re going to gradually merge merproject.org and sailfishos.org. Just another line in the footnote that is Maemo/Meego/Sailfish/etc.
There’s another mobile operating system on the rise, but this one is special for a few reasons. First, it’s not necessarily trying to unseat iOS and Android — it’s designed to run on feature phones. It also has received significant investment from Google, and in most cases, Assistant and other Google applications are preinstalled. The operating system in question is ‘KaiOS,’ and it’s already shipping on a handful of phones, including the 4G version of the Nokia 8810 and the Jio JioPhone. I’ve been using KaiOS for a while on the Maxcom MK241, and while it’s definitely better than the average feature phone, it still has rough edges. A KaiOS device is definitely on my list of devices, since it’s a popular operating system I haven’t yet had the chance to try. I like the idea of having a more focused, less capable device, with better battery life and less distractions.
PureOS has laid the foundation for future applications to run on both the Librem 5 phone and Librem laptops, from the same PureOS release, in contrast, they say, to Google and Apple’s ecosystems which still have separate OSes for mobile and desktop. Now, Google and Apple seem to be intent on converging their mobile and desktop platforms, leading to fear and consternation from desktop OS power users, who assume that the move will dumb down desktop OSes. While this technical aspects of the PureOS team’s accomplishment are interesting and laudable, I’d suspect that the bigger challenge for any mainstream platform will actually be a user experience challenge, especially bridging familiar UI elements between mobile and desktop user environments.
