Comment by d3Xt3r
3 hours ago
No, you're right. SailfishOS inherits the core of the OS from the old Maemo of Nokia N900 fame (though the UI was built from scratch I believe). I tried it back in the day on my Nexus 4 and it was buttery smooth, even with all its fancy animations and gesture-based navigation, which was way ahead of Android at the time.
I always thought SailfishOS would really take off by now, given how advanced and polished it already was at the time, but Jolla's mismanagement nearly jeopardised the whole thing (they filed for bankruptcy last year).
The platform always suffered from two big architectural missteps.
1 - the native browser being an old firefox/gecko fork embedded into their own UI framework, giving a poor performance and dated compatibility quirks 2 - the android emulating runtime meant that you get again, dated , poorly performing android apps, that you're driven towards because the browser engine was so poor.
these two mean you basically end up with a sub-standard android handset/UI, and a tiny market for native app development (because everyone made do with android), its a real chicken/egg.
In fairness I've not used it since the sony XPeria days, but it was my daily phone for 3-4 years since the Jolla 1. It was cool being able to emacs and irc natively on the phone, but that was limited in use cases tbh.
Same experience here, though from Sailfish OS run on their first Jolla phone.
Also permission model on Sailfish was much worse than on Android. I didn't use Android apps on Sailfish, though.
I really liked Silica UI, but available apps had much less functionality than their counterparts on Android and iOS. I think that open sourcing Sailfish and Silica would end up better for them.
Nevertheless, I kinda liked the phone, but ultimately went back to Android.
They filled for bankruptcy again last year (first was the Tablet debacle in I think 2015) but have since managed to survive it again, so all is well. :)