Maybe its a good Idea for Jolla to release Android-Support as Standalone-License for Community-Ports.
For me it is okay within the Pricerange of 50-100€, because there will be more work for the Jolla-Team for Maintenance these Project.
In my Eyes it would enhance every newer Community-Port.
What do you think?
It has been hinted at in some Jolla communication (was it a Community Meeting?) that Jolla is looking into something like this.
But we do not know what the status of that is.
You could schedule this question in one of the next Community Meetings.
Has been on discussion last time at 2022/06/09 here: #sailfishos-meeting log
(from 07:32:56)
Complete Answer:
We’ve looked at the possibility of stand-alone Android AppSupport for third party ports internally on several occasions over the last few years. At each point, it was decided that the challenge of providing a product of sufficient quality and with adequate support would be too great compared to our current approach of offering the best possible experience on top of officially supported and developed adaptations. It’s worth noting that Android AppSupport for community ports is more than just providing the relevant packages. We’d also need processes for verifying that everything works, ensuring the right apps are made available in the Store, ensuring that ports are kept up-to-date and also implementing technical changes to the repository backend. Having said all that, we are still actively investigating the possibility right now once again. The plans aren’t what might be called “advanced”, however, so if we were to do this, it wouldn’t be in the immediate future.
I’d guess if it was that easy to provide AD to more devices there’d also exist an AD port for the Gemini PDA already…
Arguably it is easy as some ports seem to be able to sideload it.
I seem to recall i read somewhere that the Gemini PDA has an ancient kernel, so i think that is the bigger reason for not having it.
Yeah, the gemini kernel is another issue (afaik some VM modules missing). At least these are relevant for waydroid which also doesn’t exist for the Gemini. Probably also mandatory for AD? Don’t know if backporting is an option but I guess if it was that easy somebody had already done it
Yeah I think it’s pretty safe to say that for any device to be eligible for modern AD it’ll need to be on at last and Android 8 base and a 4.4 kernel. There’ll be other stuff needed too, but that’s the main blocker. Did the Gemini ever get a newer kernel?
I think it will be too much work for Jolla to support AD for community ports, although there are some community ports, like the Tama family devices, in which AD should work as it is without issues. I guess even that is not worth it for Jolla.
On the other hand I would like to see some more effort on native solutions, e.g. MFA for Exchange will reduce the need of AD, etc.
There is a lot of free and open source software for Android, so a converter software would be wonderful, that creates or compiles a SFOS .rpm from the sources of the Android app.
For example for this: