Comment by rzerowan
2 hours ago
Thats part of it actually , they have(had) a nonstandard offering via Sony hardware. If it was a known OEM like Oppo/Honor/Oneplus theres already some familiarity/buyin from users and lines possibly can be opened for select verticals.
Instead with the SonyX offerings , they linited it to a tiny range, upgrades as i recall were sometimes not possible to newer versions and a separate support contract to Jollla was needed.
A pure play ala android would do better, they (jolla) do the software - the OEM does the hardware/updates similarly to how Linux distros like Ubuntu get bundled into Dell etc.
If they were a hardware firm like Huawei bulding their phone and OS makes sense , or with massive scale like Google with Pixel.They are neither. Hardware is hard, and scaling it at volume moreso.
I have Sailfish X on an Xperia 10 III (eg. officially supported Sailfis OS) and I am getting Sailfish OS updates just fine.
As for phone model support - mobile hardware is a mess at low level with most APIs that make PC hardware easy to support by a single OS image (such as ACPI tables) simply missing. Not to mention various hardware bugs that the Android firmwares need to work around or paper ober as well.
As for support contract/subscription, that is I think still a recent idea they are playing with on some newer devices. I actually think its a good idea, as it adds an incentive for the OS vendor to support existing hardware.
Currently it is usually the other way around, where the manufacturer is also the downstream OS vendor that does not get any money past initial purchase and basically wants the device to become unusable as fast as possible, so that you buy another one soon.