Comment by stiray
2 months ago
I wouldnt recommend it.
TLDR: while the OS is great (really GREAT), the real-world compatibility is not.
I had Sailfish OS for a daily driver for two years, and OS is great (let me say that again, Sailfish IS GREAT!), but there are "the details".
Jolla is completely ignorant to needs of their users. While they do have an android layer, they are ignoring to things that are of huge importance for daily life, like bluetooth passtrough, and are important due to daily needs, for instance, bluetooth passtrough is really important for using public transport here.
FFS, I was reversing banking application and patching it to be able to use it. And actually became very good at it :D
Here is a bluetooth feature request thread, that is open for 5 years: https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/bluetooth-support-in-android and being blatantly ignored.
And lets not get into details, like NFC.
So at the end you will have a great OS, incompatible with the whole world. After 2 years of suffering, I ditched Sailfish, bought Pixel and installed Graphene OS.
Once Jolla starts to listen to their customers, they are on the path to very real android contender, but unfortunately they just dont understand, that people need some features, they are not providing while the vendors wont support some exotic OS. They need to adapt, not vendors - the whole thread is full of this mentality.
The android "container" was a step into right direction but they just shouldnt abandone it and keep on supporting it, adding additional layers of compatibility.
I really hope they will change their mind at some point and prioritize compatibility, would love to ditch android and its spyware driven ecosystem completely, but sadly, Graphene OS + NetGuard is just a far better alternative until Jolla stops behaving like an infant. They are literally sabotaging themself in a worse possible way.
For a company of their size that has to compete in the tech market of today, I'm surprised they're able to produce updates for the OS as regular as they do.
Blaming they can't keep up with user requests, granted reasonable ones, is a little short sighted in my opinion. If we want to break the Apple/Google duopoly we need to be able to bear a couple of paper cuts. If you wait for perfection before committing they'll just end up going out of business. :(
This is nonsense. They cant force vendors to support them, so the only viable strategy is to support the vendors. And they can, but they decided not to.
I feel like you're focusing on the wrong thing from what I said. Jolla is a small company, they don't have the man power to support everything. They already do a lot by supporting devices from vendors that are sympathetic to being open (the Sony open devices program for example).
> And they can, but they decided not to.
They can what, exactly?
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How is Bluetooth used in public transport? I don't think I've ever seen that so I'm curious what nifty solution this is. Are you meant to check in via Bluetooth so you can't have multiple people use the same subscription in different trains or so? Does it open station gates? Give you real-time travel information without needing internet or them having to put up fragile displays at rural stops?
I would not sey they are ignorant - rather, some things are unfortunately just not possible with their staffing and budget. Connecting Android bluetooth blobs compiled against bionic libc via glibc Linux distro to a container running Android emulation is one of these things.
Support for vital features needed for normal life is a must. And all available resources should be put into it as it is making their OS viable for usage. No android application support, no users.
I have struggled for 2 years. Most users wont.
Put yourself in their place for a minute. There's a thousand to-dos, including this Bluetooth pass-through feature. If you try to get around to all of them, you need to hire more people, either telling them up front that you won't be able to pay their salary or just not mentioning that until after they've done the work. Or you need to find more paying customers, but you're already trying to do that. Every minute spent on that also is a minute lost on making a better product. How to allocate the available time optimally? It's not as simple as "they're ignoring the community completely".
Saying that this is not a product for you because there's other devices out there without this problem: entirely fair, but that's not the same thing