Is there a future for SailfishOS?

Same here, having to patch all the holes in the wall would be way more expensive than $1k :rofl:

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And I believe that.
I am spending only a small part of my free time for hobbies personally since sfos won’t pay rent or feed my kids, so I cannot relate.

As for iOS, android etc, that’s just personal preference and needs that everyone has.

After reflashing alot of things where better. After installing all the apps I need I got back alot of problems. Still not bad as before but bad anough to think about an other OS. :frowning:

Overview (issues copied from my first post, with updated status…):

  • RAM usage: at the first 2 or 3 weeks of use there where no problems, but now I only can use OSMAnd for 20 oder 30 minutes. That it crashes and I have to restart. Also one of my banking apps is not working. I can login, can see my budget, but than the app is crashing because of a lack of memory.
  • Android support not restarting automaticaly after crash of an app. In the settings of android support is just written: “can´t start” (german: “kann nicht starten”) as status. So after crashing of navigation I have to go to settings an manualy restart android support. After some time than I can restart OSMAnd…
  • In one of approximately 30 cases can’t call somebody. – restart of phone solves the problem
  • SMS is working without problems.
  • In one of approximately 15 cases opening an email with the stock email app, the email app crashes. – restarting the app usually solves the problem
  • Stock contacts app works fine (no crashes anymore).
  • In some cases the battery usage is quite high. So still sometime I lose 20 % of battery over night. And in other cases only 2 %. – Restart of phone solves the problem for some time.
  • The fingerprint sensor is still working.
  • Syncing contacts using CardDAV stopped working again. If I change a contact in thunderbird, I see the changes in my webmailer, but the changes are not present at my phone!! When I create a contact at my phone than after some time I have 274 oder even 542 times the same contact in my webmailer and thunderbird. So syncing is nearly 100 % broken. Something like this can happen, but there are NO information at all, that there is a problem. Even if I open the settings, there is no hint that there is a problem. - I have to connect using ssh to the phone and have to deal for “hours” with this problem. If I creat at the phone
  • Camera app starts quite slow. But this is not the worst. If I start the camera out of the lock screen than the camera app doesn´t save images. I looks like it does, but at the end there are no pictures!! If there are running some android apps it is nearly impossible to start the camera app. So befor taking a picture I have to close all android apps!! Taking a snapshot of my kids is next to impossible.

Last update has been in February. When there is the next one?? Great would be 2 or 3 feature updates a year. And between them 4 or 6 bug fix updates. Currently some of the problems are because of crashing apps regarding memory usage and sandboxing (or better sadboxing as @slava told). So do I have to go back to a sfos version without sandboxing??

Sounds to me like having too many apps runming in the background. I have the same issue when many android apps are installed, many of them have services or prestarts. Try identifying those wit crest or lighthouse.

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It is considered a not-trustworty way of getting apps check the quick start guide about and you will find also the original author of this suggestion. You can read his comments in that post thread.

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About the future of SFOS

Before answering this question, we should agree what is SFOS and what is not. However, I wish to skip this premise and go straight to the point with this image:

The original high resolution image is here.

What’s this image shows? A sleeping system when untouched that consume 5%/h of battery which means 20h of stand-by. It is not a great achievement because it should be 100h of stand by for an optimised system (here).

On the other side, we notice that CPUs stopped to be pollute and fall asleep and awaken constantly (sleep, awake, sleep, awake) apparently without a real need. BTW, the system consumed 5%/h of battery - while untouched with the CPUs which NEVER goes to sleep. This means that apart the display consumption, 4G and WiFi connections, the system was running at its 100% of the time.

Update: now, with the 4G data mobile and WiFi tethering connections active, it sucks 6%/h. Therefore the changes tested are more suitable for a daily calm working session rather than keeping the smartphone near our bed while we are sleeping (check here).


How did I achieved this?

This is the log of that day and changes:

  1. in the morning I developed this patch to fix few udev rules and applied to the system - reloading and restarting the systemd-udevd and related services would have been enough but I did a reboot for be 100% sure to not have bad surprises after.

  2. during the day, I used it with different application and for several tasks also with Android Support and Android apps.

  3. Before leaving the smartphone untouched for 4h, I did a swap offload using the script conveyed by this patch about zRAM and applied some power management rules (not published yet) about CPUs and internal SSD flash devices.


Why this achievement matters?

From a point of view of the performances, it is not a game changer. From the PoV of bringing the OS part of SailFish OS under strict control - in particular about power management vs performances - it is a huge advancement.

After all, the great business that Google and Apple did was not about their OS but about their Market revenues. In fact, there is no hopes for apps developers to earn good money as long as the operative system below their app is out of control and does not provide a consistently good performances.

Which is the reason because the Linux kernel won the global challenge of being adopted. Also in this case, the great business is not about the kernel itself but about all the applications that can run because that kernel delivers a consistent good QoS (quality of service).

Think about this, because it is about the future of SFOS much more than everything else.

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That’s all nice, but the most important thing for any product is support. That may be official (like there is now) or community (like many other open source projects), but there has to be support. And since there are core parts of the OS that are non-free, full community support is impossible.

The main problem for any open phone will always be hardware. Lets face it most open phones (HW) are crap. And the closed ones are … closed. Which means lack of optimization of missing features or whatever.

On the SW side we already have newer Qt (thanks to rinigus and pigzz) so all it needs to happen now is glue the UI layer to the underlying libs that also need to be upgraded in many cases. And replicate the experience we have now using a newer UI. This requires manpower -which we don’t have.

And then there is apps. Which is another issue on its own.

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and hence the question in the header… =\

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The SW parts are there.

Thanks for that advice. I didn´t know that Aptoid is insecure. But what to use instead?? Aurora Store is not working any more. How to install my banking app??

Because it requires a google account for downloading apps from google play. Try UpToDown, for example or download your banking app directly by the bank website. In this case, you have to temporarily activate the “accept to install app from unknown sources” and check that you are on your REAL bank website and HTTPS is active and its CA certification is fine.

Thanks for that advice!! I installed both apps (crest from storeman (!) and lighthouse from ChumGUI).
Lighthouse shows 788 processes. But I have no glue what mce, dsme or ohmd is. Do I have to learn all of them to use SFOS? :wink:
Crest only shows 9 active apps. But there are some interesting things. It shows that the sfos email app uses 150 MB ram (RSS). So there for is clear that it closes from time to time. It simply consumes a lot of ram… And I used Fdroid some time ago, but it is still running and consumes 120 MB ram. I was wondering how to close it. I simply opend Fdroid ones more and cloesd it again. Now it is realy closed.

The bank doesn´t offer direct download of the app and UpToDown hasn´t this app. In general it looks like UpToDown only includes quite old (versions) of apps. And why UpToDown is more secure than Aptoide?

Ask @olf, s/he know the subject. You can always create a Google accout to access to Aurora market and keep it unused as much as possible. However, the SFOS by default queries the Google’s time, supl, dns and web search engine and the microG works better with a Google’s registered devices and with a related account.

You can also give a try to those services that download app from Google Play store but at your own risk because we cannot verify what is in the download: the real untouched app or something else that mimic it, especially for banking.

Update: another way to deal with this specific problem is to keep a old Android smartphone at home and connecting it with your SFOS internet sharing WiFi tethering when you need a token validator or a banking access / operation. Which is not a insane idea, after all with your Linux smartphone you might want to do things that can break it at the point you have to re-flash it and having at home an Android old smartphone as backup for essential tasks can make the difference.

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I tried again the instructions from reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/12tn6oe/comment/jhb9obz/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Didn’t even think of that but it’s working for me now! On Android 12 I went to Settings > Apps> Aurora Store > Open by default. Then ticked the boxes for market.android.com and play.google.com.

I set this settings and opend the banking website using firefox. I long pressed the link to the google store and clicked “Open link with external app”. Aurora opend and I could install the banking app. :smiley:

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i can confirm that this trick works well, I can now open the Aurora page for a specific Android app - thanks!

Aptoide can be safely used if you stick to the APKs that are offered in the official store and always check the source.
More info here Android Markets: How safe are alternative sources? - IzzyOnDroid

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I was curious and looked for Jolla Oy’s company data via Finnish “Business information system”; abbreviation “YTJ”.
https://tietopalvelu.ytj.fi/yritys/2399817-6

I found out that Jolla is in “restructuring/re-organization” as of since 21st June 2023.
I do hope that SFOS finds it’s way alive through that…but if I needed to guess, then AppSupport gets boost and SFOS get axed.

No news though about replacing the russian part of ownership in the company…atleast I haven’t seen anywhere. Must be quite complex task to accomplish due to the sanctions…

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This makes me a bit nervous. I had the first 770 outside Nokia, and developed some popular software there. It felt like we were living in the future. Fast forward a few years, Elop killed the N9 and Jolla became the only interesting alternative.

Right now, one can perhaps run an AOSP distribution such as LineageOS. But it is a house of cards. Sooner or later, Google will pull the plug and it will become impossible to run libre Android. Besides, the userland is a bit frankenstein-ish.

I hope that SFOS stays alive. Strategically, it is absurd for Europe not to have a open mobile OS.

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