Direction for the future of SFOS?

General
#82

Man the things people get worked up about over 25 EUR. I’d barely be able to get a dinner for my wife and I at a restaurant here for that price. It’s not even a limited-time license either, it’s perpetual. That’s insane.

You’re acting like they’re not working on when just in [Release notes] Tampella 5.0.0.55 they discussed support for various Sony devices.

I’m sure your 25 EUR (which if they’re paid anything reasonable wouldn’t even cover an hour of work, by the way) helps but let’s not pretend they can dedicate all the time in the world to it. They still have to function like a normal business and prioritize.

Maybe chill out a bit, try to put things into perspective, and realize not everything operates at timescales that are most advantageous to everyone?

8 Likes
#83

The problem for user/client isn’t the 25, 50 or whatever Euro, the problem is that we can’t proceed but stuck.

2 Likes
#84

Here’s some perspective for you:

My Sony Xperia 10 III is failing and is in urgent need of replacement. The battery is failing and the USB port is more or less a goner. And to be clear, I would love to be able to switch to a 10 V, but it has to work for me.

I need AppSupport and other features that are in the X-suite. There is no license available for the V, thus no replacement is possible. Not having the X-suite is a no-starter and will mean the end of the line for SFOS for me. It’s that simple.

The C2 is also a non-starter. it’s just not a practical phone for me. Too large, too much of an unknown quantity.

As for the larger picture, @Seven.of.nine is right, the features are missing. I came onboard in 2019 with some hope for eventually getting a phone which could meet my needs. SFOS has not really been taken to that level. A lot of features which one can consider normal for a phone are missing or borked. The Bluetooth implementation is extremely limited, implementing only a minute set of profiles. GPS is often not working correctly. Memory management is borked so much that if you run out of memory, which is not an infrequent occurrence, the phone will just start acting unpredictably and have all sorts of crashes. I was always hopeful that this would improve over time. But if I can’t rely on them to make the necessary changes, then why continue to hold out?

And as long as perpetual licenses are still not implented, we’re effectively looking at a SaaS solution until otherwise noted. Not acceptable for a device as important as my communications centre, and it never will be.

2 Likes
#85

Precisely. I paid €49 for my first phone and was pleasantly surprised.

Yet some people get worked up about all sorts of shit and blame a tiny company for… what, exactly? Being a tiny company?

As they say: No good deed goes unpunished.

3 Likes
#86

I think the only way for SFOS to move forward at reasonably fast speed is to make all of the components of SFOS open-source and well documented.

I’ve been using SFOS for years, until v4 came out I used it as daily driver on my XA2 until if fell apart but the feature (compatibility) gap between android and SFOS has grown so much that it becomes less usable as daily driver and it’s more like a toy, at least in my case. I’m running a company so all the basics must be rock solid (wifi, 4g, calling, texts, browser, email), and that is simply not the case.

Nevertheless, I have order X10 II recently, and will buy yet another licence and see what I can do to help.

So I’ll try to steer this discussion in more positive direction and point to some low hanging fruit that I think will help out tremendously:

  • make all stock apps open-source so people can jump in and add features or fix bugs, instead of writing replacement apps (example: stock camera vs advanced camera)
  • start writing some basic getting started documentation for core OS development so new developers can setup dev environment quickly and start contributing

For those that missed it Camera2 API development is a good read, I have wrote about these issues before and it is a good example of dispersed knowledge of core system between members but not available in any convenient place for newbies like me to access.

Just my two cents. Now with new Jolla management I’m really hopeful we’ll see more and more components open and documented so more of us can get onboard and start making SFOS overall better experience for everyone.

6 Likes