I used to own a Jolla phone, and there was something magical about it. At the time, their ideas and execution were a breath of fresh air, and the experience was amazing even despite some unavoidable teething problems. I happily used it as my daily driver for about 2 years, proudly showing it off to friends at every opportunity, and not wanting to switch to another phone.
Now, as such things go, many of the unique ideas dreamt up by Sailfish have been absorbed into the major OSs (which will no doubt claim they innovated them themselves), and Jolla had to close because competing at both the software and the hardware model simultaneously turned out to be unsustainable for them. And my own Jolla phone developed a hardware fault and that was that.
So I reluctantly switched back to Android. But none of the mainstream OSs managed to quite capture that magic, even despite having now copied most of its features. And when I tried the latest version of Sailfish on a Pinephone about a year ago, it too no longer felt like it had that sleekness I had come to love on the Jolla.
> I used to own a Jolla phone, and there was something magical about it.
I did too, and I more or less hated it. The whole UI was impossible-to-remember gestures and swipes this way and that. Pretty much like iOS, but even worse. (Even Android has been going that way since then. Can't tell for sure when its usability peaked; sometime between 2013 and 2018?)
I found the vision behind gestures very intuitive.
The main idea you had to understand was that you have 'edge' gestures, and 'inner' gestures. 'Edge' gestures relate to functionality that has to do with the phone as a whole and are available at all times, and 'inner' gestures relate to functionality that has to do with the specific app currently in use, and if any actions are available they will be clearly signposted in the app. And the apps were explicitly designed with this interface in mind.
I thought the onboarding tutorial was very clear, and the learning curve to start using the phone effectively was negligible once the above 'phone vs app gestures' was understood.
By contrast, Android has attempted to copy these gestures, but they are severely lacking with no unifying theme in my view (I cannot speak for iPhones since I do not own one, but from my limited interaction with them they don't seem any better, and when I used relative's iPads, my personal response was that the gestures effectively needed to be 'learned' and really didn't make intuitive sense to me).
Effectively android doesn't quite make the distinction clear between 'edge vs inner' or 'phone vs app' gestures, and it comes down to the user (and/or app developer) to figure out what works where by trial and error; the horizontal swipe from the edge constitutes a 'back' button (but only if you keep it 'pressed'), the vertical constitutes a 'apps list' button (but only if you keep it 'pressed'), and a vertical swipe without keeping it pressed acts as a 'home' button. The only thing they've kept from Sailfish is the top-to-bottom edge swipe showing you notifications. But it shows that effectively instead of making gestures a first class citizen, they've just said "how can we add gestures that act as buttons", but it's still a button-centric experience rather than a genuinely intuitive gesture-based UX.
As a result, most people I know tend to turn these off and use the software buttons instead, despite the slighty cost of screen real-estate. I've chosen to keep them on, but whenever I hand my phone over to my wife, the first thing she asks is if I can enable buttons so that she can do what she wants to effectively.
Jolla, as opposed to Sailfish itself, was all about the physical phone, running Sailfish OS.
At some point they became a 'consultancy' company, effectively using Sailfish OS on devices or whatnot, but without bespoke hardware. There were a very small number of devices that more or less supported Sailfish.
I was surprised to see they have now restarted their hardware attempts, with a limited batch of specially ordered "reference implementation" devices, made by a partner in Turkey.
I might have been tempted to order one if the campaign hadn't ended already. But, having said that, I don't have much faith in such 'limited batch campaigns' anymore. Having a phone whose entire ecosystem is at risk of completely expiring after a couple of years isn't fun anymore; even if it's still a linux phone in theory.
Did something happen that made Sailfish relevant again? Surprised to see it on the front page today.
It's unfortunate that they're taking a closed source model when others like System76 and Librem are using their hardware sales to fund open source development.
There's also webOS, which was originally funded by Palm and doesn't seem to have any open source development any longer, and the Maui project which is basically one guy trying to make his own Linux UI.
I'd love to see a team with decent UX sensibilities tackle a touch-first Linux UI. Nothing I've seen so far has impressed me. Seems like there are a lot of onesie-and-twosie sized projects that take forever to ship anything and never hit critical mass; meanwhile, nothing really holds a candle to the design of Android/iOS.
> There's also webOS, which was originally funded by Palm and doesn't seem to have any open source development any longer,
After a short stint at HP, webOS is now owned by LG, they use it as the OS for their Home Entertainment (TVs, projectors,...) and nowadays also as an Automotive OS platform.
It's very much alive, too - LG just sponsored a hackathon to develop games for the new webOS store (including a Flutter-specific stream) with some legitimately good prizes (I think first prize was $100k, second was $80k).
I have the option "show details" and there to choose "strictly necessary". (on mobile Safari and Desktop Edge, Desktop Firefox blocks the cookie screen automatically)
TBH, I prefer all of WebOS (on HP Pre 3), Maemo/Meego (on Nokia N9 and N900) and Ubuntu Touch (on Meizu MX4) over Android for the UX qualities.
Obviously, they lacked in phone hardware and app selection, but basic experience was unmatched.
IIRC, Sailfish was inspired or derived from Maemo, so I wouldn't be surprised it took some great stuff with it.
Hitting the critical mass is tricky without having hundreds of millions to lose before you "validate" your experiment: Nokia was at that point with N9 release (to a wide acclaim in reviews too), but shifted right after that release fully to Microsoft Windows straight to their demise.
Canonical pulled out quickly as well, and well, HP Pre 3 didn't even make it to the market (WebOS changed hands weeks before the release).
I actually used each of these phones for a couple of years, and that was so much smoother (OS-wise) than Android. Never used iOS for a longer period to make any claim there (though if I go by MacOS, it's much hype for nothing).
'world domination' not possible with "Sorry not available in your country".
I have worked Sailfish before, so I know what to expect. while a great OS, it is hard to compete with the established market. even the inclusion of libhybris won't change that... as in that case, why not just buy an Android device. unfortunately privacy is a niche to tailor to
I have two Jolla phones left over from when they launched in India, years ago.
I vaguely remember there was an India specific phone running Sailfish as well, but by that time my company was no longer working with mobile applications.
We ported several proprietary telco Linux tools to Jolla but it turned out using a laptop with a 3G dongle was more convenient than a tiny low res screen (big surprise).
I’m not sure why they’ve limited themselves to Europe, probably because of support costs. Pity, Sailfish was ahead of the curve on many aspects, especially the swipe from the side UI pattern which showed up years later in IOS.
Yep, economics. They used to even have their own phone, but soon moved to repurposing Xperia devices. Not sure if there was a relation between Ericsson and Jolla employees, but this would not amaze me.
Note: I have worked a lot on MeeGo and Maemo before this. I only had Sailfish running on my N950s, so can't judge the final devices. Wish I could ...
I'm using an Xperia 10 III w/Sailfish now, but honestly I liked the Jolla phone I had previously much better. Unfortunately the latter eventually developed an electrical glitch which made it useless and I had to replace it. The Xperia is way way too long, and with other physical things I don't like - but that was the only option if I wanted full Android support (as I had with the Jolla phone). And it doesn't handle the camera very well (it can take many seconds before it actually takes the photo, and there seems to be other issues too). It also didn't handle a Japanese SIM card very well, unlike the old Jolla one.
Other than that it works fine, but there's definitely room for improvements.
It would lose power suddenly, and restart. Battery was fine (replaceable), so it looked like a glitch somewhere in the electronics. But I used it for many years until then (had to give it up this spring).
Honestly the N9/N950 feels a lot more polished - UI wise - than sailfish.
It is kind of expected, given the budget of Nokia ... But even some of the design and aesthetic choices of Sailfish don't really age well once the novelty wears off
If BSDobelix had done some basic research, this would have turned up:
"In 2024, to escape Russia's investors due to the Ukrainian war, the Jolla initial company filed for bankruptcy, continuing its activity under the JollyBoys name." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolla)
Quite a gutsy move, in my opinion, and as far away from "near scam" as can be.
I have nothing written about Russia nor Ukraine, but closed source software and the promised "pre-order" jolla tablet.
However it's interesting that a Finnish company files bankruptcy and had that much investors from Russia, so thanks for a additional point....and that name JollyBoy...
fwiw I was working at Nokia R&D when Elop trojan horsed us, Jolla (and sailfishOS) was the result of people making MeeGO jumping ship.
I don’t know if it’s the same now, because 12 years or more of fighting the duopoly with no cash to speak of in comparison must have meant selling your soul somewhat, but I doubt it’s the intent to do anything shady.
Android (in popular use) tends to have a lot of closed source bits, though I agree that it should be entirely open source. I would guess that not having it straight FOSS is more a function of financials and headcount to be good stewards than it is of ill-intent.
For those curious, it's a continuation from where Nokia left with their Linux efforts, that's the roots in a nutshell. They did ship a smartphone with their own hardware in 2013. I still have it in my drawer.
Definitely ambitious, and an achievement, for a small company tackle OS, hardware, dev experience, everything.
I had a Nokia N9, their second attempt at Meego/Maemo, to this date it's the weirdest consumer device I've ever owned. The device shipped with a front camera but it was not accessible through any default app. The closest I got to it working was a mirror app someone made in a Hackathon.
Issues aside it was a beautifully designed device, you could see real innovation. Unfortunately Nokia killed it before it even shipped.
I had a Blackberry Z10 after the N9. Even though they were very different in their goals, it felt very much like a spiritual successor. BB OS10 dying as soon as it did really hits me to this date.
Assuming a compatible phone and a compatible carrier (AFAIK AT&T and Verizon both still operate white lists), no there's nothing stopping you. There are/were US users who bought Sailfish over VPN. But for official hardware at least, "compatible phone" is the sticking point. The last phone with a North American variant was the Sony XA2 from early 2018. Today it's a brick because Jolla never gave it VoLTE support.
I looked at the libhybris page and a few other sources, but am unsure how much of Android is implied when using libhybris. Random person on Internet claimed it is a minimal, but complete, Android user space install, but my reading of the libhybris page doesn't seem to imply that. The libhybris page does imply some of Android user space. A (probably out of date) Android kernel with all the OOT binary blob drivers Android is famous for, seems like it would also be a requirement.
Am I misunderstanding how bad this is? Or, is Sailfish rather than being a real alternative to Android just helping to entrench the terrible situation with Android Linux kernels?
The Sailfish guys are actually the creators of libhybris.
If you run SailfishOS you have to first have Android flashed onto the phone. They use the same kernel, camera drivers, GPU drivers, etc as the original OEM including the prorprietary wireless BLOBs and the Android Radio-Interface-Layer ("RIL").
I've spoken to the Sailfish guys awhile back and I get why they did this -- 10+ years ago there was basically no choice but to use the Android port of drivers + the Linux kernel the vendor shipped because there was no other way to make these hardware pieces work, thanks to the silicon vendors.
The story of not needing BLOBs and things like a libhybris-shim has slowly improved, but not 100% . We can run Debian linux on the Qualcomm Snapdragon laptop devices (Thinkpad X13s, etc) but bits and pieces are still not there (audio, full power management, Bluetooth, etc).
To current Qualcomm's credit there are people inside who are pushing for everything mainline Linux, and minimizing proprietary pieces.
Libhybris is great for making a tech demo. I wouldn't base a product on such hack, anymore than sell Linux laptops with ndiswrapper...
If something doesn't work in the binary android drivers, the vendor won't help you (we support only android, sir). Nor can you fix the drivers yourself, because you don't have the sources or the knowledge how drivers work.
All the phones sold with Sailfish OS & all the officially supported Xperias used libhybris - same with most unofficial ports. While not ideal, it works reasonably well - saying that as someone who has been using a Sailfish OS device as primary phone since 2013.
"and yet, it works". To this day my Jolla is the best phone I had, always fluid and reactive compared to much more recent and powerful Android phones. I don't remember any driver issue with it.
Well, again, while not covering all aspects of mobile apps, it could run Android apps at a time no other mobile Linux (or any other non-Android device could do it).
I wish it was feasible to have alternative mobile systems, but it's not really.
You can't simply give up every popular app for a system nobody else uses or develops for.
Sailfish has Android emulation, but good luck running banking apps without Google SafetyNet. Even pure Android ROMs, like LineageOS, can't do that.
Also good luck with proprietary firmware for mobile networking and cameras. Another thing that usually holds back AOSP distributions, and will likely be even worse in a non-Android system.
Today sure, it just needs support from a major player. Not -that- long ago, nearly every mfg had their own OS(Blackberry, Meego/Symbian, Win Mobile, Palm, etc) and each had enough apps.
If Samsung or Huawei or probably even Motorola decided to ditch Android and go all in on Sailfish, we'd see support for apps in short order. But as a third party OS you have to install yourself, it's basically dead in the water.
What BlackBerry did before giving up was a smart approach, they basically just converted Android apps to BlackBerry ones for you. And that'd be a fast way to get bootstrapped. They just didn't have enough steam left in them, sadly.
They had enough apps in the same way 640k of RAM was enough for everyone.
I think it's a fantastic topic, but to be succinct: we couldn't get app makers to keep parity between iOS and android, including banks, government and transportation apps for a very long time.
Assuming it would go easier with a random 3rd OS where "I'm sued for illegal deals" Google has struggled so much doesn't sound realistic.
The Blackberry Storm sold 500,000 units in its first month and 1 million units by January 2009.[15] However, Verizon had to replace almost all of the one million Storm smartphones sold in 2008 due to issues with the SurePress touch screen [16] and claimed $500 million in losses.
To elaborate - Nokia innovated a lot. But internally Nokia was chaotic. They were Google, before Google got the reputation for creating projects only to kill them when they had hardly started.
Couple this with the absolute dictatorship that the Symbian division had over what they were releasing as a cellular device, and Meego/Maemo never had a chance. Up till the N900 the Maemo division was blocked from having cellular. After the N900 it was too late really. They clambered to make the N9, but it was at the breaking point and so they did the burning memo thing. The N9 was basically the blueprint for the Windows Phone models Nokia released.
The community got fractured when the N9/950 did MeeGo Harmattan. This was a continuation of Nokia's Maemo OS that was based on Debian, but they just called it differently when they announced a collaboration. Nokia and Intel started a 'merge' called MeeGo (based on moblin and fedora). Nokia never actually used this in a device as they signed the famous partnership under Stephen Elop's guidance standing on a burning platform.
Sailfish is a successor of this actual MeeGo work that was done and therefore had an uphill battle. They never got the same traction as Maemo (or even Mer), so I never called this a successor of Nokia's work. Nokia created a community with developer conferences and handing out devices. Jolla couldn't do this ... and therefore remained niche.
My N900 with Maemo was fantastic. It's still working Just Fine, mechanically as good as when new (the Mercedes-door feeling sliding keyboard, for example), the only reason I'm not still using it is because it only supports up to 3G, and that isn't available anymore where I live. Such a nice phone. I could easily make Debian packages and install them, my minicomputer emulator for example.
The MeeGo transition stopped it for me, and Stephen Elop's burning-down-the-house strategy killed everything.
I have all of the NIT devices, but found the N810 the best; great keyboard, large, thin... but unfortunately no 3G. N900 is second best; great camera and nice User Experience
But for an old phone a very open and developer friendly environment (Linux like maybe) is attractive. Sadly those available are limited to more modern phones, which is I think a mistake. Maybe the answer is a side loaded application with a ridiculous amount of permissions?
> You can't simply give up every popular app for a system nobody else uses or develops for.
Perhaps the solution for such a phone is to make PWAs feasible for every kind of app?
I guess it would need a few essential built-in apps (something like an Apple Health analog) but hopefully the rest could be web apps with extra privileges, if needed and approved by the user.
Is geofencing already possible with PWAs? I.e. location based events? If not, that would also have to be a builtin (helper) app.
Yep, if you capitulate from the start than nothing changes. And you as a user are giving them a chance to lock you into custom OTPs (that are just little changed standard OTP to force you to use their app so they can track you, steal your contacts and god knows what else (i have reversed it, got the seed and i am running it from shell as I was sick of it) even if they have a classic web page.
Everyone just agreed that it is fine if certificates are no longer used for web apps (even with a fully standardized pkcs#12 tokens), everyone just agreed that bank is using some non-standard otp generator, everyone just agreed with everything. Now you will soon have to pay heating in car on monthly basis.
Stop agreeing. Start complaining. Now and you.
Sailfish on Sony Xperia 10 works like a charm, with working things that even modded roms are having issue with.
If you fight it back... I am running my banking app (that they have even if they also have a web based app) for 4 years now without any issues, they did a major rewrite in between, but quite frankly in most of cases Safety-net is just a bunch of sand into eyes of security, if implemented right it might have impact but at the end most of banking banks are reducing it to if statement (that i patched).
Yep, true that normal user cant do this, but this is users call. Complain to financial ombudsman, complain to the bank, demand a way for you to authenticate if you are paying for the product, complain bank supporting phone monopoly etc.
Harass developers that decided to verify if phone is rooted, prove in media that they are just a bunch of kids having a boner on security they don't understand (which is a huge fact in all annoying login schemes, from mail to sms etc., OTP was more than enough (sms... giggling... ss7 access on tor for 500 dollars monthly)
Actually you are addressing wrong problem. It starts somewhere else, when you want to use Bluetooth hardware that has a custom app to use it and you cant use it on Sailfish while you cant use it in Android layer as there is no bluetooth pass-trough. Here I vote with my wallet, not buying such devices and waiting for Sailfish to implement it.
> I wish it was feasible to have alternative mobile systems, but it's not really.
I think there is a possible exception here.
I mean, firstly, yes, sadly this is largely true.
I had a Blackberry Passport, a beautiful handset running the QNX-based BB X OS. Over a year of ownership it gradually got less and less useful as app vendors turned off BB X support. No FB IM, no Whatsapp, and I have a phone that won't let me text with 90% of the most-contacted people on my phone.
And in those days (2014-2015) I did much less with my phone than now.
But I also own 2 little-used tablets.
I use tablets for watching films and TV, reading books, occasionally email. I don't do any of the mobile-phone stuff on my tablets, and they do not have SIM cards in them.
I would have as much use for a FOSS-powered tablet as I do for an Android or iOS tablet.
Poor patchy phone support does not cut it, sadly, and that's more than doubly so without apps.
But good support for at least one currently-available cheap Chinese tablet would be of legitimate interest to me.
So the EU attempts to invade your privacy using smartphones [1] and forces duopoly-brand smartphones upon its citizens, yet it fails to compel Apple to allow true sideloading, so you're stuck choosing between "no freedom but some privacy" or "no privacy but some freedom"? Their digital policy initiatives overall seem like a net loss for EU citizens as it stands.
I was trying to make a case that when you add up everything the EU has done recently with regards to digital policy, you get a net loss for EU citizens. Their attempt at chat control decrements the score by a significant amount. Amending the DMA to have it not be completely useless would increment it by a significant amount, but it is unknown if that will happen yet.
They don't offer hardware tokens by default. Often you can request one (you will be charged). I did just that despite it not being advertised option. I just said I need one.
I think all banks in my country as well provide hardware token method (used to be paper cards, nowadays a small Tamagotchi like device that outputs codes) if you don't want to use a phone app.
If you want to go in and do the basics (check balance, do a normal transfer, look at activity) this can get you by. A lot of the more useful features tend to be app only though. E.g. "scan to deposit check" is an app only item for my bank.
I can do that sort of thing from the Ally website. Which is good, because Google is actively killing off support for devices more than a few years old, and I can't run most new apps on my phone, banking or otherwise (old apps are hit-or-miss, but the practice of forcing updates to the latest version poisons most of them).
You got a cheque? How quaint. I haven't used one in almost 2 decades. (Australia) in fact when telstra refunded me $2.50 by cheque I simply threw it away.
This has to be a predominantly American problem, right?
I cannot imagine a cohort of Australian, Asian, New Zealand, British and European continental users noping out of an app because not cheque enabled.
I'm as old as a dinosaur and I haven't used a cheque in my life, not even back when bank accounts were managed through this little paper book with numbers and stamps.
That's simply not factually correct. You can use bank web sites entirely without a smartphone. Banks supply this option as there are really - surprise! - people without smart phones who still has money.
My own bank does not even use 2FA. I log in using the officiel state sponsored digital ID (yes, without having a smartphone). This is in Denmark.
(sorry about the new anon account, it's been so long since I posted I've forgotten my old account. Perhaps I should use a PW mgr...)
I use it since 2014, 10 years and counting. I used the first Jolla 1, which was a lovely device, with a very dim screen :) It uses Wayland, Pulseaudio and Qt. I also used it on a Sony Xperia XA2, and since recently am on a Sony Xperia 10 III.
The Android App support is good, I use Whatsapp and Signal with it, also Firefox and DuckDuckGo browser. Just keep in mind that the Android App support is to get a few apps running that are important to you. Choosing Sailfish also means choosing mostly native apps. The system browser is built on the Firefox engine. SSH support is lovely though. It feels just like desktop Linux.
Don't expect a super slick experience. Companies like Apple and Google are pooring billions into their mobile OS. A small comapny like Jolla cannot keep up with that. Also the Android drivers are as is, the Jolla developers cannot improve on them.
Edit: by the way, it uses Firejail to have apps locked into their own jail.
I owned Jolla and Jolla C phones, that were made by the developers of Sailfish OS, until I got tired of swimming against the tide and switched to Android.
At the time it was very close to desktop GNU/linux OSes: software in rpm packages, wayland, pulse audio, easy SSH to device. It was easy. I still find myself confused when using Android, Sailfish OS was easy.
Not great, not terrible. The android support is hit and miss and the official store is mostly full of junk. Their SDK is rudimentary and there is close to no documentation. After they signed a deal with the russian state I gave up on them. I am on Plasma now which has an overall better experience.
Do you use Plasma on a phone or tablet? If phone, can you say which hardware platform and how "well" it works as an actual phone, making calls, texting, etc?
Are you saying that Plasma Mobile runs on any device that is supported by libhybris?
I was asking about Plasma Mobile ( https://plasma-mobile.org/get/ ) that the parent mentioned switching to and I wasn't aware that libhybris is a requirement.
If you want a plasma mobile device, your best option is to find devices that are supported by PostmarketOS. That is a distro (kind of like Ubuntu etc ...), which under the hood can use libhybris to talk to Android drivers etc..
I used it for years, owning multiple phones, up to 1-2 years ago, then switched to Graphene OS and never looked back. It is an interesting project, with a very innovative UI and very close to a true GNU/Linux on your phone. But ultimately the reasons that led me to change were: (1) they never managed to get the critical mass needed to continue, so there were very few native apps that were more than hobby projects (2) the Android support was never 100% working and stable for me, with frequent connection drops in particular and some unsupported apps (3) a small team meant that both Android and Linux security patches were always months behind upstream (4) it's not really open source in the end.
But mostly it was (2): on my daily driver phone I need to be connected 100% of the time, things like the Android networking silently failing were a major problem.
I've used it for several years and the feedback from a user point of view is not positive. My sample size includes me and several members of my family who used Sony Xperia devices running SailfishOS for several years.
The Sailfish guys for some odd reason decide to invent their own "user interactions" where you click-slide ("one handed") to do certain opertaions. This makes the UI not only awkward, but NOT intuitive. You don't know what your options are until you perform this strange operation. I get why they did this, it was a way to potentially reduce swiping, etc but now that we have phones with big screens, you can actually put those options in one UI.
Further, basic things like composing a text and attaching a photo requires a round-trip to the photo app where you 'tag' the images you want ONE BY ONE rather than being able to do this inline from the SMS/MMS application. I think this has gotten better recently but for a long time it was SUPER awkward.
Two other perplexing points was how SLOW the UI felt for what should have been compiled Qt code and poor battery life on the older Xperia devices. Maybe they're using QML and it's not compiled?
The Sailfish guys have what I think is an ugly looking UI as well.
They've "dithered" certain parts of the UI so it really looks like old-school EGA/CGA graphics, even though the display is high-DPI and they have what's effectively a TUI style interface.
The only people I know who "LOVE" or claim "it's the best" UI are the same ones who LOVE Zune and Windows Phone UIs which are basically flat UI, almost monocolor nearly TUI type which is what you see pieces of in Win10 as well. Personally I dislike this UI and so do many people I know, there's a reason why UIs have icons and ideally text labels. TUIs have their place but so do GUIs.
If the Sailfish guys abandoned their weird UI ideas and frankly made it more like iOS or Android (I know, so boring, we have to re-invent the wheel just because...) it would actually be compelling.
On the very very plus side of Sailfish, as someone else pointed out, it's basically a GNU/Linux device that uses RPMs. I was able to install dnsmasq, set up DNS based adblock filtering, curate firewall rules and basically harden the device. You could SSH into the device via USB without adb stupidity and once I set it up, it stayed working until the VOLTE switch-over occured.
I think Ubuntu Touch has a better "UI" (I've also run this) but the Ubuntu guys have basically been ignoring VOLTE and since all major US carriers have switched over to VOLTE, your phone basically can't really make calls now on Ubuntu Touch (but that's OK, they've improved a bunch of other stuff! /sarcasm off).
Ubuntu Touch (not that you asked) is also a LOT slower than it should be and because the Ubuntu Touch guys are pursuing an 'Over the Air' update model, since the OS can basically be overwritten, applications aren't actually unpacked at install time but dynamically at run time. On a desktop this is OK but on a phone it leads to very slow app loading times.
I have high hopes for the current batch of Linux phone projects, Mobian, postmarketOS, etc but sadly I'm on Android until these are fully solidified.
I actually have the opposite opinion. I like their UI, with the drag-down feature to select options, etc etc. Though I liked the very early Sailfish version on my old Jolla phone even better (it was upgraded on the Jolla phone as well, but yeah, the old one felt better. But not everybody agreed with me on that).
The issues I have with my current Sony Xperia w/Sailfish is a) Nearly impossible to get a Japanese SIM card to function (as a second SIM), and when it worked it did so only sporadically. Basically useless. Same SIM worked fine in an Android phone and an iPhone (both brought over from Europe). And the camera.. it works, but it can take many seconds before the photo is actually taken, and all the features of the camera(s) aren't available. Not that I use it much for photos (though the ones I do take look good), but..
(And of course I also hate the long narrow super-slick easy-to-drop Xperia phones, but they're just like nearly every other phones these days, and the only option for an Android-enabled Sailfish phone now)
Funny, I used the Nokia N9 back in the days and the UI of (what was called Meego back the IIRC) was head and shoulders above everyone else. I believe the they were the first to have general gesture navigation so your comment about reinventing the UI is somewhat off the mark. Android implemented things after them, it's sort of like the argument that unix terminals should adopted ctrl-C for copy because it's the "standard".
I actually bought a Sony Xperia 10 and sail fish because I wanted the UI back so bad, but unfortunately I have some apps which didn't seem to work with android emulation (mainly banking...)
I am not saying the gestures in Android and iOS (app switching, etc) are actually the value add, but in fact things like toggles for options, or a "=" where the options are available to turn on/off. Sailfish forces gestures for things inside an application as well.
No doubt Meego innovated on ideas, but just because they came up with something doesn't make it "good" and just because Apple/Google copied it doesn't prove the validity of the idea.
To that point I would prefer we used more screen real estate (Android, iOS, whatever) and REDUCED the usage of gestures, it would end up being faster. It sometimes takes me multiple attempts to swipe from the bottom on a Android/iOS to get it to do something because I have a screen protector and/or case and the way I'm interacting the with the device is different than the developers who might have worked with a "nude" device.
The screen protector/case issue made UI navigation even worse on Sailfish devices because you had to use this gesture inside a program, not just to switch between applications.
Ubuntu Touch also has a swipe, but from the side where a screen protector is slightly less likely to affect it's ability to register the gesture.
Tbh N9 is still way ahead than today's Android experience imo.
It's also more consistent gestures experience than sailfish. Here you know the gestures are basically for "window/app management". Everything else - they look like regular Android apps.
So if I want to run it, what would the best supported device? I do see the list of supported devices, but they vary. Which one would provide the best experience?
Usually the first party supported Sony xperia devices should all work well with all the bells and whistles of sailfish (their Android app support, some proprietary sync functionality)
If you have an old Motorola, OnePlus, older Xiaomi Devices - you can get the community ported Sailfish OS. That won't have their Android app support, but there are other options to get that working.
So they are using waydroid... nice! Use this myself a lot on Linux-based tablets/computers, like the Legion GO.
Wonder how well this integrates with the (edit: Sailfish) OS.
Unfortunately, this also does not do screenlocks and therefore has security restrictions and certain apps refuse to work properly.
I get your point: "patches are welcome", but I meant to understand what it does with Sailfish besides launching applications. Android and MeeGo had the idea of intents, like sending a file through a certain application. Also, the filesystems are probably separated.
Filesystems are separated but i used to bind mount Folders like Documents, Downloads, Pictures etc.. into the Android container.. thereby sharing the important data.
Other integrations could include making sure your contacts between Android and Sailfish are in sync.
Not sure what the status of notifications is.
Keeping the clipboards in sync.
Half of these things can be "hacked into" by using something like kde connect in the waydroid container.
Integration with Android intents like share etc .. would be stretching it..
Thinking of the same thing. It would be interesting to see a graph of all the submissions that came from various discussions, and people are discovering or rediscovering new things. Dont know if anyone has every done something similar.
Eh...I wanted to love it, got first Jolla device (still have it in the drawer) but I simply couldn't made myself use it... Swipe navigation is just annoying and imprecise to use daily :|
There's a 70p document (available at: https://docs.sailfishos.org/Develop/HADK/) that details how to port Sailfish to any Android device. From a skim, seems straightforward and not harder than building an Android ROM. Could maybe be outdated in some parts, since even if says last updated 2023, mentioned Android versions are from 2021.
Now, as such things go, many of the unique ideas dreamt up by Sailfish have been absorbed into the major OSs (which will no doubt claim they innovated them themselves), and Jolla had to close because competing at both the software and the hardware model simultaneously turned out to be unsustainable for them. And my own Jolla phone developed a hardware fault and that was that.
So I reluctantly switched back to Android. But none of the mainstream OSs managed to quite capture that magic, even despite having now copied most of its features. And when I tried the latest version of Sailfish on a Pinephone about a year ago, it too no longer felt like it had that sleekness I had come to love on the Jolla.
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