Yipee! Ok, I can't afford more hardware, but it's my favourite mobile os and I develop/maintain apps for it, so I'm happy to see the amount of effort Jolla has put in in the last 2 years to stay relevant and up their game!
If you spend development time on the ecosystem, I could maybe pay your voucher (the 99€ downpayment part), then you can get the hardware on release at the discounted price they offer for backers
Edit: I'll probably miss any replies here. Email me on (rot13) wbyyn99@ytzf.ay. I'm offering this because imo it's important to have an alternative ecosystem to Android, considering the developments in the last year where it's becoming more like iOS. Other developers who are short on funds who read this should also feel free to reach out, though I'm not some super wealthy investor I can see about what I can do
They also recently split the automobile UI part off from the Phone bits. That joint work was part of the problem for FOSSing everything, since they have deals with Car manufacturers which depend on their IP.
The main distinguishing feature is that you generally lack a keyboar / mouse /pointer thing. Hence, the window manager and interaction in general are tuned for touch interactions, single handed use and the like.
It's for this reason I like SFOS. I've tried android and ios. But they suck.
As a developer, I also appreciate the flexibility even within the limits. Gradle and co. suck.
Thanks, that was on my list. And itself could fairly easily be addressed through a window manager or contained environment which served touch-only apps.
Other factors so far as I can read them:
- Insanely good power management, particularly relative to features. A dumb/feature phone can of course see much better battery life, but offering a small fraction of the services of a smartphone. (Whether or not this is a reasonable trade-off is another question.) Much of this is through chip hardware optimisation (meaning that emulated Android environments would perform poorly), and aggressive culling of background processes (which means that a full-featured desktop OS would perform much more poorly on its own as well).
- Various HW phone features, particularly display quality and cameras. To a lesser extent, audio output.
- Extreme wireless data dependency, whether cellular networking (4/5G) or WiFi.
- Cloud-based storage of virtually all data, largely implemented/enforced at the app level. Corrolary is that it's quite difficult/challenging to share data or files between applications, not to mention that it's often a bad idea to do so.
- Identity attestation, including at the network (SIM) and hardware level. I'd think that an NFC chip, identity token (e.g., Yubikey), or worn identity token (e.g., NFCRing) could stand in for this.
- Generally an update/upgrade model that the mass public seems to find acceptable (though I ... have my doubts).
And, though I said I'd exclude it: the apps ecosystem, both in terms of popular social networking tools, and a rich market for developing highly-specific applications for particular niche needs, whether commercial, institutional, activity-specific, or recreational.
The touch-based environment really seems like it should be possible to meet within a desktop/laptop context, and given existence of AndroidOS (or similar/compatible) emulators / environments, I suspect is.
Battery life is probably the biggest direct technical challenge. While reading your reply the thought occurs that with SoC/SBC systems, it might be possible to run a low-power mobile module which is independently active when mobile-only services are required, with data sharing through storage to the main system.
Further offloading comms load (4/5G networking, voice comms) to external devices (mobile hotspot, dedicated feature phone) could provide yet further optimisations.
There are a number of rust developers building for SailfishOs. Rubdos maintains a Signal client in rust. The toolchain also runs on the build service maintained by Jolla (obs). I'm not sure what the editor has to do with it. I use vim for most of my SFOS development but sometimes use the SDK, sometimes I use Godot.
I have no doubt sailfish is a reliable build target. I mean, can I dock it and code in an IDE/text editor in sailfish the way I currently do in osx or linux distro
Nope. You can use SDL2, which is behind the Godot port for Sailfish (3.5 still). Supertuxcart, Openlara a bunch of games stuff is viable. There is an active Lua Love porter and and and ...
They've been opening up bit by bit. First stuff like 'jolla-weather', recently, the notes app and numerous bits in the backend ... Currently sync for nextcloud system integration is in the works.
