Back when I tested Sailfish OS on my PinePhone Pro, I was put off by the requirement to log in to a Jolla account in order to update the OS.
Given that, from what I could tell, many license/account-related things have changed in the meantime, such as the Sailfish OS license becoming voluntary, has anything changed in regards to being able to update the OS?
I understand why the option is there for the users who expect it, but I don’t want all eggs in one basket. I choose to use separate accounts for every type of service I use (if not self-hosted), so I don’t want to link my device to an account like this when I’m not interested in the other services anyway.
For the paid version of official ports/devices, a Jolla account would likely still be needed for OTA updates. edit to add: Or you could download the new version to your computer and flash it to the phone. That way you would segregate the download from doing the update.
Where a free version of an official port exists, i.e. one with no OTA updates and without Android App Support, I think an account is needed to download the initial files for flashing. Updates can be done by downloading a new version and flashing it to the device, or possibly from the terminal. (Search the forum for details.)
The story for community ports may vary between devices.
It’s not exactly what the OP was looking for, but I created dummy accounts for each of my devices so that when I replace one with a newer model, I can simply give away my old device to someone else along with the account and paid license.
Sorry for a lack of clarification, I meant in regards to the upcoming Jolla Phone. I would imagine that what applies to C2 here should also apply to the upcoming phone?
That is my guess as well, meaning that initially there may be no way to flash the phone but it would be added later (I hope).
So, Jolla account needed for updates. When flashing becomes possible, downloading updates to your computer would still require an account, but you should be able to delete the account from the phone.
Updating in the terminal would likely also be possible, and there are tools by community member @olf for this, but it is officially discouraged. (I used ofl’s tools for a number of years with no ill effect, from what I can tell, but YMMV.)
The service is Harbour (app store) and updates.
Not being interested in those (and thus not having a Jolla account on the phone) is very silly, but very possible.
Oh, I thought Jolla offered a suite including a mailbox and the like. I will be completely honest, as I only registered an account to participate in the forum, I wasn’t aware of what is provided…
Well, if these are all the features included, outside of Sailfish license (which appears to be voluntary nowadays?), I find it hard to justify linking an account over. I don’t see why I’d need an account for software updates.
They provide nothing of the sort. The both don’t have the resources; but are also fundamentally uninterested in your data so scraping it through “included services” is not a revenue stream they are pursuing.
Licenses going forward is honestly not super clear. But it only ever enabled install of the handful of value-adds including Andoid AppSupport, MS Exchange, and GUI updates. Cheapskates have been updating through CLI since forever.
Since several of the packages provided are rather large, a basic account is probably a useful thing to have if it would come to needing to limit a DDoS attack.
Because they need to check whether you’re eligible for the update. OTA updates are (officially) a paid feature. The license is voluntary, but you lose some stuff on the free version, most importantly the Android subsystem which might or might not be important to you. Also something with Microsoft Exchange or whatever but that’s of no interest to me personally.
This is becoming really confusing. True, the voluntary license exists, and I wouldn’t mind looking into it. However, as far as I could gather, that license isn’t connected to anything any more?
Are there two license types? Does one replace the other? The outdated information on official websites and the amount of threads on this forum to read through is making it really difficult for me to process information about this.
The shop page states 5 years of updates, but it will 100% be dropped and will be just lifelong, voluntary subs give them all the money they could expect from paid subs (even more) and introducing DRM/paid subs etc would cause a huge backlash, the bandwidth cost to keep all on latest cve-patched version is miniscule
Old licences (xperias) you pay for android appsupport, ms exchange, t9 and something else, you got lifelong updates, they wanted to move to subscription like 5€ a month, but instead started offering free appsupport for xperias IV/V, C2 is now also lifelong I think, the paid forced sub option is gone
Currently the voluntary license does nothing indeed.
There are no devices where it makes sense. C2 (and presumably J2) have a license included as per above.
10 III and older are legacy (see shop.jolla.com).
10 IV and 10 V will be announced how they work once they are ready for daily use - until then most value-adds are just freely available there.
Please point it out if you see it. This is a claim i keep seeing, but it has rarely been true. Many people seem to try to see things that are not there and chalk anything else up to not being current.
I may report it when I see an inconsistency in the future. Given that until the announcement of J2 I wasn’t involved at all, used the wiki or forum, I will need some time to familiarise with Sailfish OS. I posted the topic because I wanted to know what to expect when I start using it on the J2 when it’s ready.
Not sure why but I installed again. see zypper output of fresh install without any account. Seems possible to install stuff:
[defaultuser@Fairphone4 testdisk-7.2]$ LANG=C devel-su zypper in jolla-email
Password:
Loading repository data...
Reading installed packages...
Resolving package dependencies...
The following 13 NEW packages are going to be installed:
buteo-sync-plugins-email jolla-email jolla-email-all-translations-pack jolla-email-settings
jolla-settings-accounts-extensions-email libqmfmessageserver1-qt5 nemo-qml-plugin-calendar-qt5
nemo-qml-plugin-calendar-qt5-lightweight nemo-qml-plugin-email-qt5 qmf-notifications-plugin
qmf-notifications-plugin-all-translations-pack qt5-plugin-platform-minimal sailfish-components-calendar-qt5
13 new packages to install.
Overall download size: 1.9 MiB. Already cached: 0 B. After the operation, additional 1.9 MiB will be used.
[defaultuser@Fairphone4 testdisk-7.2]$ LANG=C devel-su zypper in harbour-gpsinfo
Password:
Loading repository data...
Reading installed packages...
Resolving package dependencies...
The following NEW package is going to be installed:
harbour-gpsinfo
1 new package to install.
Overall download size: 90.9 KiB. Already cached: 0 B. After the operation, additional 272.9 KiB will be used.
# no additional repo added:
[defaultuser@Fairphone4 testdisk-7.2]$ cat /etc/ssu/ssu.ini
[General]
arch=aarch64
brand=Jolla
configVersion=15
credentials-scope=jolla
credentials-ttl=1800
credentials-url-jolla=https://download-internal.jollamobile.com
credentials-url-store=https://store-repository.jolla.com
default-rnd-domain=jolla
deviceMode=4
domain=sales
flavour=release
initialized=true
registered=false
release=5.0.0.72
Nothing really silly in it. People are free to use their devices how they like and do what ever they want with them. And we try not judge, or restrict that, although it does tend to cause a lot of head ache for us
In practice, as already stated, the account is needed on the device mainly for installing apps from the Store, and for access to the Jolla licensed components like the Android AppSupport. And also the system update information is published via the store backend, which requires Jolla account authentication.
Also the repositories containing the hardware adaptation packages used to require Jolla account authentication, but we dropped that requirement lately. So in theory installing system updates does not require the account anymore (if you are not interested in the licensed components). But the repository configuration on devices has not been updated yet, so in practice it probably will complain about missing Jolla account, even if you update from command line.
We will review the information around the licenses and try to clarify it where needed. It is maybe a bit confusing in many places, as things have been evolving along the way.
It’s not really silly when their whole income relied on providing those paid-for elements, the fact cli-updaters from OR worked for community devices (and paid versions too) doesn’t change that fact, you still didn’t accidentally end up with app support on community devices using sfos-upgrade, the system worked
Edit: wait nevermind, you mean silly is opting out of anonymous jolla account that provides that, yeah I guess
Edit2: inb4 why anonymous account, they don’t even bother(ed?) checking your email:
