
Jolla is the last company with an 'alternative' mobile operating system - cmurf
https://www.engadget.com/2018/03/01/jolla-sailfish-os-team-interview-mwc/
======
raimue
Half a year ago in September, I left Sailfish OS and Jolla after I had
exclusively used "alternative" mobile operating systems. I started with the
Nokia N900, after that I had the Nokia N9, and then both the Jolla and Jolla C
with Sailfish OS.

The UI concepts of Sailfish OS were great, the gestures were simple and
intuitive. However, it lacked so many other features. The Android emulator was
only compatible with apps for Android 4.4. Although being marketed as secure
and privacy-aware, users have no control over apps, as there is no mandatory
access control or any other permission system. Remember, this OS has been in
development for over five years by now. Also, many parts of the UI stayed
closed source, although Jolla promised from the beginning they want to release
more open source components. If they wanted contributors, they would have more
likely contributed to user-visible stuff like the mail app — not to some lower
level middle-ware that is open source.

All of this and some more reasons caused me to finally pull the plug and
switch to Android. I wrote about it in lengthy details here:
[https://raimue.blog/2018/01/09/goodbye-sailfish-os-and-
jolla...](https://raimue.blog/2018/01/09/goodbye-sailfish-os-and-jolla/)

~~~
jasonkostempski
"parts of the UI stayed closed source"

If anything is closed, except drivers they'd likely be forced to accept
binaries for, I wouldn't even consider the OS. Who do they think their target
audience is? I imagine most people looking into an alternative mobile OS are
well aware of the slippery cliff that is proprietary software. It's the whole
point of looking around. I'm looking for full control so I don't get stuck
with someone elses bad choices yet again.

~~~
rqs
How about another angle: Android is Open Sourced and much powerful than
SailfishOS. It's much easier for their target audiences to targeting Android
than their OS.

~~~
realusername
> Android is Open Sourced

Only partially, the ASOP does not run on anything because of the vast amount
of blobs and basic drivers missing and people are maintaining open-source
reimplementation of the gapps to make even the most basic apps working.

~~~
simonh
True of course, but: 1) Any other open source OS would have exactly the same
problems. And 2) They wouldn’t be any easier for them to solve, so why not
concentrate efforts an solving it on AOSP which already has an ecosystem?

Yours is an argument why all struggling OSS mobile OSes are struggling, not
particularly why AOSP has problems. Surely if even AOSP is struggling to solve
these issues, what chance do the others have?

~~~
realusername
> Any other open source OS would have exactly the same problems

Not to the same degree, Linux still has some blobs to run on modern computers
but nowhere near as much as Android. Android needs blobs for absolutely
anything. And you don't need an equivalent of the Gapps on Linux, it would be
like something as common as systemd would be proprietary.

> Yours is an argument why all struggling OSS mobile OSes are struggling, not
> particularly why AOSP has problems. Surely if even AOSP is struggling to
> solve these issues, what chance do the others have?

Google does not care any more about open-source on Android, the current open-
source bits are just there because of legacy history, they close all the open-
source parts step by step. The Gapps used to be open-source at the beginning.
AOSP isn't struggling, it's just there's no open-source movement.

~~~
sangnoir
> Not to the same degree, Linux still has some blobs to run on modern
> computers but nowhere near as much as Android.

Uhh, come again? Android driver blobs _are_ for the Linux kernel that Android
uses, and OEMs don't bother mainlining their drivers so Linux is no better
than Android, by definition.

> The Gapps used to be open-source at the beginning

This is flat-out wrong. GApps were never part of AOSP- or open-source.AOSP
included _alternative_ open source apps that offered similar functionality
(like a mail client)

> AOSP isn't struggling, it's just there's no open-source movement.

Lots of projects are based off AOSP- it's not obvious because they have names
like CyanogenMod, LineageOS or Copperhead. There is in fact, a vibrant open-
source movement.

~~~
realusername
> Uhh, come again? Android driver blobs are for the Linux kernel that Android
> uses, and OEMs don't bother mainlining their drivers so Linux is no better
> than Android.

Android has one kernel per phone people patched for their own needs, it's much
worse than that. You can't take your kernel on a Samsung Phone and run it on
an HTC. I can run my Linux kernel on most computers without much issues, good
luck running an Android kernel on a random phone.

> Lots of projects are based off AOSP- it's not obvious because they have
> names like CyanogenMod, LineageOS or Copperhead. There is in fact, a vibrant
> open-source movement.

CyanogenMod and LineageOS is the same entity, that only makes two big
communities. You don't have that many communities because maintaining an
Android ROM is much much harder than maintaining a Linux Distribution. That's
why the compatibility list for CopperheadOS is ridiculously small.

~~~
sangnoir
> CyanogenMod and LineageOS is the same entity, that only makes two big
> communities

So you agree that there _is_ an AOSP open-source movement? Nevermind it's
harder to create a ROM than a Linux desktop distro because drivers are not
mainelined by OEMs, but even this will be resolved by the HAL from Android P
onwards.

------
catwell
I have never really liked any of the major players. I used to run WebOS on a
Pre3 for a long time. Now I have a Jolla C, but it isn't my main phone because
of its poor battery life, so I also use an Android phone.

The saddest thing here is those alternative OSs innovate a lot. WebOS in
particular was years ahead of both iOS and Android in terms of UX (after all
they had Matías Duarte on board... [1]). Sailfish is more interesting
technically, in that it was probably the fastest OS to do "zero to non-trivial
native mobile app" on thanks to its development tools (the Qt environment,
with QML, a standard build VM...).

I backed the tablet as well, but I don't hold a grudge. What they are trying
to do is incredibly hard, failures have to be expected.

If you want to meet the developers from Jolla, I think they have a BoF room at
FOSDEM every year. I sat in to listen for a while in 2017, it was pretty
interesting.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matías_Duarte](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matías_Duarte)

~~~
diminish
Would you say that latest WebOS has still features which are years ahead of
for both current IOS/Android. I mean are there features which aren't
implemented in some form in by those two mobile OSes?

~~~
catwell
I don't use WebOS anymore so I don't know its current state, but I doubt it
because it's not the same team working on it anymore.

Back in the early '10s however it had things like usable widgets on the home
screen, application cards, gestures instead of buttons... which all landed in
the two major OSs years later.

------
zepearl
I'm using Sailfish OS on an Xperia X since when it became available. My main
reason to migrate from Android was "battery life" which was confirmed (battery
now lasts ~5 days instead of the usual 2-3), but the OS has a lot of small and
bigger bugs (e.g. carrier selection, 2G/3G/4G priority, stuck data comm for
Android apps) and missing features (notoriously: tethering/wlan access point,
bluetooth) that do not currently make it a valid alternative for a normal user
if compared to the other operating systems. Version 2.1.4 beta is available
([https://blog.jolla.com/sailfish-os-2-1-4-now-available-
early...](https://blog.jolla.com/sailfish-os-2-1-4-now-available-early-
access/)) which might fix many bugs and deliver some key features, but the
date for the final release has not been published (and I'm too scared to brick
my phone by installing the beta).

~~~
digi_owl
Would not surprise me that if you replaced the Google blob with MiniG that
battery life would improve on Android.

I keep seeing report after report that Play Services in particular can be a
real drain.

~~~
JensRex
>MiniG

What is this? I tried searching for it, but got nothing useful. Only things
related to crypto mining, and other unrelated nonsense.

It sounds interesting.

~~~
RussianCow
I think they meant microG, which is a project that aims to replace Google Play
Services with its own, API-compatible implementation.

[https://microg.org/](https://microg.org/)

------
dingo_bat
Instead of an alternative OS, we need a company that will make good hardware
(comparable to Samsung) and not lock down their android system and provide
open source drivers.

That will satisfy most tinkerers, since they can modify anything they want and
even load their own images since the drivers are open source.

Android as an OS is good enough. Just that every single manufacturer has opted
to lock it down.

~~~
fjsolwmv
What about Lineage and rooting your phone?

[https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/](https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/)

~~~
dingo_bat
1\. Installing Lineage degrades many hardware features. For example, the
camera will never be as good as it is on the official OS. This is what I meant
by "open source drivers". Currently all of this stuff is binary blobs, which
aren't even available freely. So it is impossible for Lineage to fully utilize
the hardware.

2\. Rooting presents another extremely stupid problem. Apps like Netflix and
snapchat and many payments/banking apps will refuse to work. I cannot find a
way to explain this except dev incompetency and/or hostility towards users.

3\. On Samsung phones there is a Knox bit, which gets tripped as soon as you
flash any image. On many models, people haven't been able to figure out how to
reset it. This means that once you flash Lineage on your phone, you
permanently lose features, even if you go back to the official OS! This is
what prevents me from flashing my phone, since I really don't wanna lose
Samsung pay and Secure folder etc.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _Apps like Netflix and snapchat and many payments /banking apps will refuse
> to work. I cannot find a way to explain this except dev incompetency and/or
> hostility towards users._

\- Netflix: "we see you have root, we can no longer trust our DRM on your
phone".

\- Snapchat: a service whose core principle was always, "you can send your
nude photos to each other, the photos are ephemeral, and they won't be able to
save them without you knowing". Rooting your phone breaks that last guarantee.

\- Payment/banking: CYA. You have root, some evil "hacker" might "hack" your
phone and steal your money, and we don't want to get sued for that.

It's very much user hostility, created by a conflict of interest between the
company making the product, and the users of that product.

~~~
fisian
And why do these then work on desktop computer without checks like: Do you
have the latest (windows) update installed? Do you have an Antivirus
installed, which we approve of? etc. (I'm not referring to Snapchat but the
banking things here) It seems to me that they never cared when on desktops and
suddenly on mobiles there are all these problems.

~~~
pjmlp
On the desktop so far they haven't had a way to ensure that, beyond Apple and
Microsoft sandboxing attempts, while on mobile the sandbox mechanisms are
guaranteed unless one has an unofficial OS.

------
Mediterraneo10
I have a Jolla 1 phone, and I do enjoy many of its features that Android
lacks, but I plan on replacing it with a Librem when and if possible. In spite
of Jolla repeatedly advertising Sailfish as an open source operating system,
much of Sailfish remains closed source (even simple, basic things like the
mail app) and there are no plans to change this. Plus, like many other sailors
to judge from together.jolla.com, I’m uncomfortable with the tight
relationship Jolla now has with the Russian state, though I do realize that
might be the only chance the company has to be profitable.

------
kryptiskt
FirefoxOS still lives and quietly has some success in the form of KaiOS
([https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/26/kaios-a-feature-phone-
plat...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/26/kaios-a-feature-phone-platform-
built-on-the-ashes-of-firefox-os-adds-facebook-twitter-and-google-apps/)).

~~~
cpeterso
KaiOS forked FirefoxOS back in ~2016. I wonder how closely they've tracked
security fixes from Mozilla's upstream Gecko over the last two years. Mozilla
removed a lot of B2G code from Gecko, so merging fixes will require more work
than just applying patches.

------
shmerl
Purism are working on Librem 5, which should apparently run Plasma Mobile. But
Sailfish has by far the best UI out there. It's a pity they still didn't open
source it yet.

~~~
craftyguy
> It's a pity they still didn't open source it yet

Yea. And if/when they go away, that UI will die with them, which is also a
shame.

------
dman
I backed their tablet and was disappointed when I learned they would never
ship it - Jolla's handling of the whole fiasco was very suboptimal.

Pinning hopes on the purism now for a hackable mobile device.

~~~
cfadvan
_Jolla had some profitable months last year and started issuing refunds to
people who backed its tablet on Indiegogo. The company won 't say how many are
left, however. "It's not that many," Pienimäki claims. "Some of them are a bit
noisy, but it's not really that many anymore." Jolla has promised to issue
more refunds every time it has a profitable month. These, Pienimäki hopes,
will happen at a "steady pace" by the end of the year. The company, however,
is not profitable on a fiscal year basis, and continues to burn through
investor cash._

It all sounds grim, and describing people you failed as “s bit noisy” isn’t
great PR. It just sounds like people in way over their heads to me.

~~~
fjsolwmv
Keeping money for not delivered product, while spending cash on other parts of
the business, sounds like fraud.

~~~
Nition
That isn't really how it went down, at least as far as I could tell following
their updates from the outside.

It seemed more like they ran out of money entirely, and their options were
either give up completely and no-one gets anything, or keep working on
Sailfish OS to hopefully get new business going, then make a profit in the
future that they can use to pay tablet backers back. And they have been paying
backers back as promised when they're able to.

~~~
dman
I dont look at the situation as charitably. They raised $2,571,262 (479%
funded) and spent more than half of it on Sailfish, while running out of funds
such that they never shipped the tablets.

The tablets themselves were manufactured by their Chinese partner and even
sold on third party Chinese websites. Funders never got their tablets, but
other customers were able to buy the same tablets for below what Jolla had
sold them.

Jolla was accepting orders until the very end before they decided to come out
and cancel the whole tablet effort.

They have since raised over 12M dollars but ostensibly that is not enough to
repay the 2.5M they raised initially.

I have no insights into their engineering or technology since I never got to
use their product, but as far as business practices go they have constantly
scraped the bottom of the barrel.

If you have some spare cycles go check out the comments on the indiegogo page
([https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/jolla-tablet-world-s-
firs...](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/jolla-tablet-world-s-first-
crowdsourced-tablet#/comments_))

EDIT - [https://reviewjolla.blogspot.com/2017/06/financial-news-
joll...](https://reviewjolla.blogspot.com/2017/06/financial-news-jolla-
reaches-70m-usd-of.html) claims they have raised 70M USD.

------
gue5t
Companies providing operating systems is a clear conflict of interest.
Evidence: the tragic state of the entire mobile ecosystem, where no hardware
can be fully utilized by (or even make calls with) an open-source OS.

This article also fails to mention Tizen. Has it been abandoned? It was
absolutely terrible (millions upon millions of lines of the worst C code I've
ever perused) but I thought it still existed, making vaguely similar claims to
open-sourcehood as SailfishOS.

The real mobile OS to watch and advocate for is postmarketOS, which attempts
to get mainline Linux kernels working on phones.

~~~
pjmlp
Oh, Tizen, I guess you are not up to date with it.

After throwing away the C++ libraries and going to that C code you mention,
they have decided to offer .NET Core + Xamarin as alternative to those C++
libraries.

Which I agree is much better than Bada C++ style libraries, but reveals they
aren't sure where to go next.

Then at FOSDEM they introduced an IoT OS based on NuttX + JerryScript, and
called it Tizen RT, even though it isn't anything Tizen related.

[https://wiki.tizen.org/Tizen_RT](https://wiki.tizen.org/Tizen_RT)

~~~
ethbro
Missed opportunity to call it TizenScript.

------
walterbell
WebOS was once a mobile OS, now a TV OS:
[http://webosose.org](http://webosose.org)

------
wicket
Is Sailfish really the viable alternative we are looking for?

Back in the 90s we suffered from Wintel dominance where if you installed Linux
on a PC, it was likely to be a less than pleasant experience due to missing
drivers, etc. The modern day equivalent to Wintel is Armdroid. Despite Android
using the Linux kernel, you can't just take an off-the-shelf Android phone and
run a Linux distro of your choice. ASOP (Android Open Source Project) forks
the Linux kernel once and then virtually all Android OEMs create a second fork
of the Android kernel fork, apply their own changes and barely anything ever
lands in mainline. Jolla's strategy to run Sailfish on top of Android kernel
forks with Android blobs inherits the same problems of Android, encourages bad
practices of Android kernel development, planned device obsolescence and the
throw-away culture when the kernel fork reaches EOL.

There are further problems with Sailfish. It is built on top of the Mer, a
Linux distribution built for Tivoisation. Mer refuses to use GPLv3 licensed
packages. Mer packages are stalled on the last versions that used GPLv2 before
they were relicensed to GPLv3. Most of these package remain unsupported and
unmaintained for years and are probably vulnerable to many known exploits.

On top of these problems, Sailfish contains many closed components and the
majority of Jolla is owned by Russian investors. Is this an OS that can really
be trusted?

Fortunately the situation is starting to change and there are real
alternatives which may be usable in the near future. There's PureOS which aims
to build a Debian-based OS for the Librem 5 phone on top of mainline Linux,
postmarketOS supports mainline Linux on a few devices in addition to Android
kernel support, and now there's Maemo Leste which is built from the ground up
to run on mainline Linux. These projects are still in their infancy but at
least there is hope for the future. Sailfish, unfortunately, does not look
like it will be part of that future.

------
deanclatworthy
It’s hardly an alternative. Having tried it twice, the gestures are completely
alien to a new user and I gave up with our test device within an hour.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
> Having tried it twice, the gestures are completely alien to a new user.

When you buy a Jolla device, you are taken through a tutorial. The gestures
aren’t that difficult to get used to. To me personally, they seem a lot more
straightforward and intuitive than my wife’s Android phone.

Incidentally, this winter I traveled in a couple of developing countries and
bought local SIM cards from an office of the main telecom concerns of these
countries. Both times when I said I wanted to use 3G data, the clerks grabbed
my Jolla from me and tried to get to where they thought the settings menu was
by repeatedly mashing where the Android back button would be. When I said it
wasn’t an Android phone, it was like they simply couldn’t absorb that
information, they just started mashing harder. That really underscored for me
just how much of a mobile monoculture the world is. (The clerks probably could
have found their way around an iPhone, too, but I didn’t see many of them in
this region.)

~~~
petecox
There's a, not insurmountable, learning curve for both Sailfish and Ubuntu
Touch.

Quirky isn't necessarily better if you're trying to woo users who just want a
familiar experience without learning new paradigms.

The lack of a back button in Firefox OS annoyed me! Instead of pressing a
section at the bottom right of the screen with one's thumb, one had to 'click'
on a web toolbar button all the way near the top left of the screen.

It's not that "gestures aren’t that difficult to get used to", it is more do
they offer anything more than the tried and true?

~~~
claudius
I got a LineageOS/OnePlus 3T a couple months while having a Jolla before and I
still miss the possibility to go from a full-screen app to a closed app. It
appears the only option is to go the the drawer/recent app things and then
swipe right there whereas before I could simply swipe from the top and
immediately close it.

------
gehsty
I think we've passed the point where there will be a 3rd smartphone operating
system. You need $$$ in order to build develop and maintain, serious hardware
partnerships in order to get your OS onto phones people actually want to buy,
and serious serious negotiating power or leverage in order to get your OS +
phone onto the carriers people use.

In all honesty I think it is irresponsible of these companies to take huge
kickstarter payouts to develop hardware or operating systems that are doomed
before they have begun.

I think that Google or Samsung cannot make a good android tablet shows how
hard this is.

------
dash2
... and these idealists have finally found a backer!

They've become preferred suppliers of the Russian and Chinese governments.

:-~

~~~
confounded
If you were the Chinese or Russian government, would you rather trust Google
or Apple with a camera and mic on all your employees?

While I don’t personally like the policies of either government, if they throw
money at FOSS, that’s still (probably, see Android) a good thing.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
> While I don’t personally like the policies of either government, if they
> throw money at FOSS.

Sailfish isn’t completely FOSS and the strategy of licensing it to clients
like Rostelecom foresees that a lot of the OS will remain closed source.

~~~
progval
It's still better than Android or iOS.

Besides, no government will actually check the whole OS themselves, so they
have to trust some company at some point.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
> It's still better than Android or iOS.

How so? Jolla’s licensing system allows its clients to bundle just as much
closed source, phone home software on their phones as any Android system. They
can lock the bootloader, etc.

------
jcelerier
Still using my Jolla as a main phone. I wish current android flagships would
be as snappy, even though it can be buggy at times.

------
maufl
I have an Sailfish X, but I don't use it anymore. Unfortunately, even the
build in apps lack features I want/need, and so in the end I would have to use
all the Android apps again.

* The Mail app does not support GPG

* The Chat app does not support any modern XMPP extensions or even group chats (this is because Telepathy does not support it)

* The Calendar has no month view if I remember correctly

But I really wish Sailfish was usable for me, I would prefer to have a "real"
Linux distro on my phone.

------
technobrat
"But many, including Engadget, found the interface to be needlessly
complicated and confusing." This and I noticed that the pulley system really
slowed me down when trying to accomplish a task with the device. On an iOS or
Android device one can achieve frequent tasks quickly without looking but not
the same with the pulley system. You can't go too fast when pulling down.

------
bullen
Don't forget Raspbian on the Zero!

[http://radiomesh.org](http://radiomesh.org)

------
jrochkind1
Is it?

[https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/26/kaios-a-feature-phone-
plat...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/26/kaios-a-feature-phone-platform-
built-on-the-ashes-of-firefox-os-adds-facebook-twitter-and-google-apps/)

------
pasta
I still think Sailfish OS can become very big because China and Russia are
investing in it. The market there is huge and both countries produce a lot of
smartphones.

------
dzonga
all I want to know can I run say the latest version of Firefox & WhatsApp on
it ? I would love to support these guys

~~~
Sylos
According to some people above, any Android apps that support Android 4.4 or
below can be emulated on it. So, I'm pretty sure that does include these two,
and Firefox in particular has been confirmed to work.

------
nialv7
Isn't Tizen still alive?

~~~
bitmapbrother
On Samsung TV's and smartwatches.

------
trisimix
Lets just make a flavor of postmarket for endusers

------
znpy
postmarketOS is making huge steps despite the small size of the project.

------
chrisseaton
Sailfish OS has the most farcical history of renames, forks and merges I've
ever seen.

MeeGo, Mer, Maemo, Moblin, Harmattan, LiMo, SLP, Bada, Leste, Tizen, Nemo...

It they spent more time on making a finished product rather than coming up
with yet another stupid new name, logo and website they might have more
traction.

~~~
craftyguy
Sailfish OS was not directly responsible for any of those. Some of the
employees were involved, but only by virtue of being employees of the
companies that started the fork/project.

~~~
notatoad
Sailfish wasn't responsible because it is yet another one of those. That's
kind of the point - _nobody_ is ultimately responsible for what it currently
is, because it keeps bouncing around between various companies who take a look
at it and say "oh, we're not responsible for that"

~~~
craftyguy
So you are arguing that they should have just ignored those and created their
own thing?

------
tdhz77
No there is another. (chime music)

------
miga
What about Fuchsia and ReactOS? What about Arduino and Energia RTOS?

