Samsung was the only other rcs provider, mobile carriers quit that long ago, it is literally googol-only now
China still has carriers providing it, so at least over there it’s still an interoperable standard. A local mobile operator here (Play) is also said to run their own, in-house infra. There 100% are other providers out there, if very few and far between.
…though, after having looked into it, a lot of them seem to very heavily gatekeep which phones get to use RCS; I’m not sure if there’s any point in implementing it on something as niche as a Sailfish phone.
Independent providers aside, the entire RCS ecosystem does seem really heavily gatekept and google-controlled and not super interoperable, looking into it just made me prefer SMS.
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Firefox works just fine on SFOS, thanks to Android App Support. And no, I would not be better using an Android device - Android itself is terrible these days, and I am specifically moving to SFOS because I can still run the Android apps that I need. Hopefully SFOS will get popular enough that eventually most people won’t need App Support, but that will surely take a long time…
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Agreed.
“Just use Android when one uses Android App Support” is such a weird argument.
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Especially because SFOS lets you stop AAS when not using Android apps.
What would be the Android alternative?
Switching the phone off?
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I’ll just remind people here that the goal is an alternative and not a platform to run Android apps in a more limited way (read: whatever is nor implemented in the AAS).
Also the work going into AAS takes away resources from making SFOS better. Which needs quite a bit of work on its own.
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Never understood that as well.
It makes sense to use native apps wherever possible, but the whole point of AAS is to fill the gaps (pun intended).
Also I don’t understand how AAS is holding back third party developers from creating native apps. If anything AAS is the one thing that jumpstarted sfos in the first place, and maybe even helped keep sfos alive through the years with licensing deals and now being a standalone company nonetheless (Seafarix).
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I think the argument you are referring to talks about commercial app developers. You are right, if a developer (a person) wants to develop an app for SailfishOS, they will do it, if there exists AppSupport or not. But from a company perspective, why should they pay developers to develop two apps (Android and Sailfish-native), when one of them can also run on the other operating system? This doesn’t really make sense for a company, I think.
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It doesn’t make sense of course. But the culprit here is not AAS, is sfos not having enough of a user base (meaning millions of times more than now).
And I’d say that AAS helps to get more users on the platform, but of course not millions.
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Yea I do think that does play into it, as part of a broader picture.
From my personal perspective (as a mobile app developer for a company in Finland), it is hard (even for me) to justify the business value (let alone to those “higher up” even for a pretty flat hierarchy) as the technical stack (Qt5 and C++, or even Qml and JS) does not compliment the rest of the technical stack in use.
To support Sailfish, I would need to create and maintain a completely different app as opposed to the one we have right now which targets Android and iOS. This negatively impacts velocity, which can impact the business. Maybe it could be justified if there was like 100k users in Finland alone and there happened to be thousands of them being active subscribers at the company I work for…but unless that was the case I’m doubtful it’d be sufficient “business value” versus the already functional Android app which can be used through Aurora + AppSupport + microG.
There’s been the discussion regarding Flutter for a while (Multiplatform target (Flutter and/or Kotlin CMP)), personally I would prefer if there was a Silica/SFOS target for React Native over Flutter (I say that as someone that writes in Dart + Flutter on the daily) as that would then increase the cross-section of the other team members that can contribute (e.g. when I go on vacations), but I don’t see any of it happening anytime soon regardless so point is sorta moot.
Of course, I personally have no issues with say…writing personal or open source apps with Silica (beyond the pain that is it being Qt5 and not Qt6) but I can’t honestly justify it outside that. Until I can basically target Android, iOS, and Sailfish with a single app, anything I would write would effectively have to be “unofficial”, as a separate app, and outside work hours. Last thing I want to do outside work hours is work on an app related to work 
</endrant>
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No, this is not what I was talking about. Even if SailfishOS had millions of more users, it would still not make sense to pay for developing two apps when one is already enough for two platforms.
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It depends.
If the projected ROI looks positive on the PnL and it’s not risky, an upwards trend on the revenue side and user acquisition is more than enough to convince people.
Jolla of course is not taking over the smartphone market by storm (for now at least), so our conversation is pretty much pointless
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I agree, so let’s end it 
Have you been able to test the camera module yet? How is the quality of the pictures that i takes?
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Testing very limited so far, particular when I was looking at the most recent build of the phone. In a well-lit scenario (natural afternoon sun) the photos were okay. Serviceable. You won’t be shooting award-winning photos with it. Though I expect with Advanced Camera you might be able to get some nicer shots since you’ll be able to play around more with settings, similar to C2.
In my discussions with the team, specifically in the most recent meeting I had, it was mentioned that there is still work to be done on the camera, including potentially after device launch. But I wouldn’t be buying this phone for its camera or the promise of future improvements to it. Just take it for how it is currently and hope it improves down the line.
If I get a chance to take a look for a more extended period of time in different lighting scenarios, I’ll be sure to post to my First Impressions thread on it.
I would say it’s better than the C2, but you’re probably not going to be using dozens of J2s on some funky rig to film the next 28 Years Later At least not yet!
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I’ve been working on an app that deploys to desktop, SFOS and Android (and theoretically iOS but I have not tested that). For main development work 95% of what I do can be done on desktop and it’ll work on the other platforms without issue.
Building and deployment to Android is a pain in the ass and sometimes takes a lot of time when Google thinks of something new to change (but I’m a one-man shop, a business would have an Android expert).
The app is build using LQML and uses Qt6. I could not keep using Qt5 because it just was not viable on modern Androids anymore so the current SFOS version is lagging.
Anyway, what I want to say is: one does not have to build two separate apps.
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Could we see a “real life” video of the new Jolla Phone in action (UI/UX etc.)?
I bought it with batch #2 and also bought a used Xperia 10 II for testing purposes. I have to say that the whole UI on the Xperia is really slow, especially with android apps. I applied 1-2 patches which made it a bit better for native apps, but android apps are still unbearable slow (Wikipedia, Firefox etc.). Unfortunately I still depend on some android apps…
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There should be videos going out on the Jolla marketing channels, I believe over the coming weeks. At least there was one posted on the Jolla Facebook page, but not sure if it has gone out elsewhere. The UI isn’t fundamentally different though (after all, it’s still Sailfish OS), performance is just much improved and buttery smooth (at least compared to the C2, can’t say for the Xperias since I haven’t used them).
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I did same thing. My Sony 10 II became somewhat better with the zram optimization. The guide can be found somewhere in this forum.
Earlier I couldn’t use Pipepipe to play video on background and browse internet or anythibg else. Now I can, but I still run to problems with android apps. They really take a lot from this old phone.
Me with my browser tab addiction has made Firefox unusable. So the optimization doesn’t do miracles, but with shutting off some apps from background and only keeping very few apps there should help.
But can imagine with more ram and processing power things will be nicer and a lot smoother.
Having used both the C2 and Xperia 10 III, I’d say the latter felt a bit faster but not by much so I expect the performance on the new phone to still be “much improved and buttery smooth”.
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