
Jolla’s Sailfish certified as Russian government’s first ‘Android alternative’ - eth0up
https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/29/jollas-sailfish-os-now-certified-as-russias-first-android-alternative/
======
CaptSpify
One of the good things that I hope will come out of these cyber-wars: Better
FOSS systems. If everyone distrusts each other then the only way to stay in
the game will _hopefully_ be to lay all your cards out on the table. I really
hope we see more open hardware come to fruition as well.

I'm sad that the US keeps pushing other countries away from our platforms, but
I do think better competition will come out of it.

~~~
superuser2
That'd be nice, but I see it going in the opposite direction: the internet
becomes too hostile for casual operators. The only way for an average company
to survive is to hole up inside the datacenters and on top of the walled-
garden platforms of the bid cloud providers, using locked-down and mostly
immutable thin clients (i.e. Chromebooks). Already the only way to withstand a
DDoS if you are small is to wrap yourself in someone bigger (Cloudflare,
Amazon).

~~~
EGreg
OR you can easily survive DDOS by not relying on friggin centralized servers
accessible over the internet for your social networks and apps. Run them on
intranets for your local communities, village etc. and run them on VPNs
elsewhere. Then mitigating DDOS can simply be done on the virtual router
level.

~~~
pfisch
That sounds incredibly inconvenient.

~~~
CaptSpify
It may be inconvenient, but you'll survive. We as an industry really need to
stop pretending that the cloud is magical and has no downsides. Running on
intranets is how a _ton_ of companies successfully do business.

~~~
jonasvp
The vision of [http://sandstorm.io](http://sandstorm.io) ties well into this
strategy (not affiliated, I just like the idea).

~~~
Zelmor
They put databases and store data in containers. What a bad idea.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Why?

~~~
vetinari
Containers are supposed to be throwaway; if you need to change something
inside, you rebuild it from scratch and redeploy.

Hopefully, your data should not be throwaway. The common architecture is to
have an application server inside container that connects to database or other
persistent storage running outside containers.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Uhm. I'm not using containers much so I'm not up-to-date with best practices,
but I recall a solution involving a "shared volume" for containerazed database
to store data in. Is this approach wrong?

~~~
Zelmor
Yes, because when (not if) your container crashes, your data is gone.

~~~
superuser2
Nope, that is the problem that mounts and shared volumes solve.

At that point you can argue there is no point in using a container, but your
statement is false.

~~~
vetinari
Mounts and shared volumes are fine, if you can guarantee that the container is
going to be scheduled on this specific machine, where the given filesystem
lives.

If you can't guarantee that, you are going into the world of NFS (which
databases do not like much) or iSCSI, or, if you have distributed storage,
into the world of glusterfs, ceph or something similar.

It's much simpler to just set up a database server (or cluster) and live with
that.

------
tetromino_
An interesting side effect of the creeping googlification and closed-sourcing
of the Android platform [1] is that it's making Android less attractive to
reasonably paranoid non-American government users.

[1] [http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-
on-...](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on-android-
controlling-open-source-by-any-means-necessary/)

~~~
dispose13432
Why are there no Open Source implementations of Google's API?

Except for that, most of their complaints don't hold water. No OS texting app?
Go to f-droid and find them. No browser? Go to f-droid.

The only issue is the API, much of which actually depends on Google Data (for
example, Geolocation would be a problem without Google's WiFi data)

~~~
JonnieCache
There is one: [https://microg.org](https://microg.org)

It's very much an alpha however.

~~~
lima
Still works surprisingly well for most basic usage.

------
gnipgnip
It looks like the process of building apps is far simpler on Sailfish, and
linux-like.

[https://sailfishos.org/develop/tutorials/creating-
applicatio...](https://sailfishos.org/develop/tutorials/creating-application-
in-python/)

I tried fiddling with Android, but the soft lock-in to Java, IDEs wasn't
particularly exciting.

~~~
gnipgnip
I just spent my morning installing Sailfish; I can't recommend it enough for
Linux users!

The effort put into localization far surpasses what Android has (for Indian
languages).

Comes with systemctl and all familiar text-file configs ones heart can wish
for.

Goodbye Android, it was nice knowing you.

------
forgotpwtomain
Anyone have experience using Sailfish OS? Any reason to think it wouldn't end
up like Firefox OS?

~~~
maheart
> Anyone have experience using Sailfish OS?

Yes, I use SailfishOS as my daily driver. I should note that I'm a Linux user,
and developer, so I am technical.

SailfishOS satisfies all my technical requirements. Admittedly there are
things that I would like (e.g. containerising/jailing functionality), but I
understand that Jolla has limited manpower.

It meets all my communication requirements, and developing for it is awesome
(I don't use that word lightly).

> Any reason to think it wouldn't end up like Firefox OS?

I don't know about FirefoxOS, but SailfishOS, thanks in a large part to Nokia
before it, has a strong community from the Maemo and Meego days. e.g.
[https://talk.maemo.org/](https://talk.maemo.org/) and
[https://together.jolla.com](https://together.jolla.com) ; also checkout the
IRC channels on Freenode.

The community is very smart and dedicated. I think with a fully opensource
SailfishOS, it could continue to maintain the OS without corporate sponsorship
(i.e. Jolla). To give credit to Jolla, they really help accelerate development
of GNU/Linux on the mobile.

~~~
baronseng
So what device are you using to run sailfish? I wonder how easy to install it
on snapdragon 821 devices.

~~~
maheart
> So what device are you using to run sailfish?

My daily driver is a Jolla1. I also own the Intex Aquafish, which I'm keeping
as a backup.

> I wonder how easy to install it on snapdragon 821 devices.

You can find information on ports here:
[https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Adaptations/libhybris](https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Adaptations/libhybris)

~~~
gnipgnip
Sweet ! I didn't realize Intex was making phones with Sailfish. This looks
like a cheap alternative to the much loved Nokia N9.

([https://www.flipkart.com/intex-aqua-fish-
orange-16-gb/p/itme...](https://www.flipkart.com/intex-aqua-fish-
orange-16-gb/p/itmehyg3mrmyfq9q?pid=MOBEHYG3ASSTKXBD))

------
bikamonki
There are countries where the chances of a new mobile OS succeeding depend
mostly on the ability to run Whatsapp. Simply put: WA is the free SMS in many
developing contries where air-time is still expensive. Carriers even offer
plans with unlimited data for WA usage and that is key to drive new sales (I
know this for a fact). I still argue that the main reason FFOS on a ultra
cheap ZTE failed to gain market share on developing countries was because
potential buyers realized they wouldn't be able to _chat_ with friends and
family.

For this reason, if Sailfish can trully run any Android app, I'd say they have
a better chance.

~~~
skykooler
Sailfish can run pretty much any Android app I've thrown at it - but only on
an official Jolla phone. Any phone where SFOS is just a "port" cannot run the
emulation layer (and sadly this is a limitation with the software itself, not
just a licensing issue).

------
hackuser
I wonder if it's a great move for Jolla: Cooperation with the Russian
government may raise more doubts than it eliminates. And what happens when the
Russian government wants the OS changed somehow? Jolla may find itself under
tremendous pressure to agree, or Russia could fork it and corrupt the brand's
image.

~~~
pdimitar
I have the same concern. I don't think when the Russian government is your
biggest (or sole) investor that you can say "no" to backdoors similar to those
recently found in quite a lot of Chinese Android devices. In theory you can
but in practice they can twist your arm enough for you to agree.

Even though I am more likely to trust the Russian gov't compared to the USA
gov't, I still can't safely assume they are the best-hearted people in the
world and they'll just open-source all the Sailfish OS code and keep the
process fully transparent.

I want to believe it but IMO this is the modern arms race and the superpowers
are simply trying to make their weapon better than the others. :(

------
whyagaindavid
For the moment for less the €100 you can buy a sailfish phone (but only IN)

[https://www.snapdeal.com/product/intex-aqua-
fish-4g-16gb/656...](https://www.snapdeal.com/product/intex-aqua-
fish-4g-16gb/656496788094)

------
jethro_tell
I've been trying to buy one for a couple weeks for unrelated reasons. How do
you have a phone alternative if they can't be bought?

~~~
maheart
> How do you have a phone alternative if they can't be bought?

I think that's the reason for the shift stated in the article.

P.S. Try having a look on eBay. That's where I bought my Intex Aquafish.
Alternatively, if you're a tinkerer, you could try a community port (note,
there's no AlienDalvik Android support):
[https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Adaptations/libhybris](https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Adaptations/libhybris)

------
kogepathic
tl;dr - Jolla tried to make a tablet based on an existing Chinese tablet
design (Aigo X86). [0] They screwed up the project management to legendary
levels, lied to backers, and kept the money. Backers have received NOTHING
from Jolla and still don't have a refund. What Jolla did to Jolla Tablet
backers borders on fraud. Jolla had the chance for a popular product with
people who wanted an Apple/Google alternative, but destroyed their
relationship with the community through their repeated delays and lying.

===

I would celebrate, but I have first hand experience with the incompetent
management at Jolla. So, I don't expect this to really make an impact at all.

Jolla ran an IndieGoGo campaign to manufacture a Jolla tablet. [1] They raised
over $2 million dollars, then spent the next 18 months mismanaging the project
into the ground.

By early-2016, their ODM in China had manufactured all the tablets for the
backers, something like 10,000 tablets were made. But Jolla ran out of money
to pay the factory for the units (and in the mean time, mislead all the
backers and said there were no tablets at all).

Now, I know people are going to say "it's crowdfunding, they're not required
to give you anything" and that's true.

But what Jolla did next was really, really angering. They only delivered a
hand full of the tablets manufactured [2]. The factory actually started
selling the finished tablets directly on Taobao, so people who weren't even
part of the IndieGoGo campaign could buy them for LESS than the IndieGoGo perk
amounts. [3]

It was only after the community found out about the factory direct sale that
Jolla admitted to anything. There was extreme backlash from the community for
being lied to, and eventually to stop the extremely negative PR, Jolla offered
a partial refund for contributors. Their CEO even showed up for a token
apology, it was lip service at its best.

In May this year, they offered backers 50% of their contribution back as a
refund, with the other 50% being refunded in 2017 with "our financial
situation permitting."

[0] [https://together.jolla.com/question/110875/we-hadnt-jolla-
ta...](https://together.jolla.com/question/110875/we-hadnt-jolla-tablet-so-
lets-talk-about-it-it-hardware-update-and-some-other/)

[1] [https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/jolla-tablet-world-s-
firs...](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/jolla-tablet-world-s-first-
crowdsourced-tablet)

[2] [https://blog.jolla.com/jolla-tablet-
closure/](https://blog.jolla.com/jolla-tablet-closure/)

[3] [https://together.jolla.com/question/124628/the-jolla-
tablet-...](https://together.jolla.com/question/124628/the-jolla-tablet-is-
there-/)

(P.S. Jolla, if you don't want backers to post negative things about your
company, maybe you'd consider refunding their money you kept?)

------
codedokode
I think it would be better just to remove all references to Google servers
from Android code and maybe install Play Services while blocking them from
connecting to Google (for compatibility with Play Store apps). I don't
understand why they decided to rewrite UI wih C++. Is not Java easier to use
than C++?

And as a result native Sailfish apps won't run on Android. I doubt there will
be many people writing them if OS share will stay low.

~~~
amiga-workbench
Sailfish is nothing like Android, its a continuation of Nokia's old Meego
platform, its built on the same tech stack which closely mirrors what you have
running on a desktop Linux machine.

There is no JVM unless you install the Emulation layer yourself.

