I want to create a summary on what features I consider to be as baseline of features for a smartphone these days. I think withot them, a phone isn’t really capable to catch up with everyday tasks and in result makes the phone less viable. So it can be considered as a checklist or benchmark for future development of Sailfish too. All of these are based on a few principles and assumption I made during the last many years as a smartphone user:
- Principle 1: Obviously, your smartphone is a phone, so having strong communication features is a must. Which means being available and being able to reach others too. To achieve these the phone should support as many protocols and standards as possible.
- Principle 2: Assuming you carry your phone with you all the time, it should be able to give you quick actions where it’s needed, where mostly these tasks are not really predictable or foreseeable, like using the phone as a flashlight, do some quick math, check weather, taking a quick photo, scan a QR code or gathering some info you need to proceess with a task, etc. Also it should be able to be your companion for navigation too with every possible travelling mode.
- Principle 3: Your phone is your personal data bank. Being able to store your sensitive data, like stored passwords, contacts, personal notes, etc. is a crucial feature to have. Also assuming your phone isn’t your only device, being able to sync your data with all of your devices in a secure privacy focused way is even more crucial.
- Principle 4: Your phone is your authentication key and your digital wallet. You must be able to store any of your cards and tickets and you must be able to perform 2FA verifications on any service you has. You must be able to access public transportation, parking, vehicle sharing, etc. since they are part of our everyday life that let’s us keep moving.
There are many more ways to use your phone, but anything on top of these are mostly nice to have features in my eyes.
There are plenty of 3rd parties that only support Android and iOS with their dedicated apps that makes adopting Sailfish OS very challenging. Many of these principles, especially principle 4 requires a lot of effort into localization and lot of effort into making collaboration with providers in each country, but it is not really possible to avoid it, because without it many of us wouldn’t be able to adopt SFOS into our life.
I can only speak about my home country since I have experience with that. In Hungary there are nation wide public transportation ticketing system, parking system and paid highway system. There is a state owned actor, namely NMFR who’s responsible for these payment services. Sadly even these are not 100% adopted everywhere, so domestic train service for example uses their very own ticketing system which is not compatible with anything else. But on the other hand there are several apps that are having these services, to bundling them into a 3rd party app is possible, and while it’s not a silver bullet for everything, it can already solve many of the issues. I assume many other European countries has similar provider than this one.
Mobile payment is another big issue. In Hungary, there are several payment services that could be adopted into SFOS. Namely we have qvik which is simply put out local version of iDeal. It is still new and adoption is slow, but in the forthcoming years this would be a big thing as it is, just like iDeal but unlike PayPal, a vendor neutral service, a common service that every banking institution in the country adopted and supports. We also has Simple and Barion which are proprietary services, so much more like PayPal than iDeal. You need a dedicated account for them and you can use them with their dedicated app. But both are widely adopted in the online commercial space. Also you can obviously perform transactions in your banking app, qvik also integrated into them. And lastly there are credit and debit card which are the most obvious options for on site payments, in physical shops. The ability to use your card with your phone is a big challenge too, since Apple and Google are dominating this space and a third option would require to be adopted by each bank in each country. So I have no idea what would be the ideal solution there.
On the communication side, adopting as many standards as possible is very important. JMAP is a new thing which isn’t widely adopted yet, but it’s the obvious choice for the future, so becoming an early adopter could be a big added value from SFOS. Also, I’d love to see adding support to RCS and VoWiFi. (I think VoLTE is already supported by SFOS.) Also TDLib is an open source protocol that Telegram uses, and would be very welcomed to be supported system wide rather than having to deal with several unfinished abandoned unofficial Telegram client. Which means I’d expect it to see Telegram chats in the default messages app, Telegram contacts in the contact app and Telegram calls in the phone app. This could be comparable to what Apple provides with iMessage on iPhones except it is an open standard.
Lastly I would need to have a robust map experience. Be able to make trip plans with public transportation with real time data is important. Just like being able to plan travel using bike or car. GTFS is an industry standard for public transportation companies. Having a map that can deal with every provider would be a dream. As of now there are several solutions besides Google and Apple maps that are dedicated maps for public transportation. One of them is the app (go.bkk.hu) which is dedicated to the capital city and it’s the first party app of BKK, the unified transport operator for Budapest. The app can deal with other operators for suburb buses and trains at some extend. But also there is an app called Utas (utas.hu - literally means Passenger in Hungarian) which is the same thing but for the entire country, for nationwide bus and train service, for local service and even for international service like Flixbus and others.) Both app were developed by the same company, hence the similarities, also there are some local provider that uses their own apps that are also based on this tech (like go.tbusz.hu or go.thurybusz.hu). This small company who is responsible for these apps is called RealCity. With experiences with other transportation apps like GVB in Amsterdam, PID in Prague or Tranzy app in Cluj Napoca I can confidently say that RealCity by far made the best possible UX both on web and mobile. Their apps are very robust and very convenient to use. All of the other apps feels painful to use after their ones. Even Apple Maps, Google Maps, or Citymapper feels inferior to them. The drawback of them is that I can’t really use them abroad which I really miss. I would use their app everywhere if that would be possible. Fun fact, it is possible to use it in Lisbon via lisbon.realcity.io! 
Also for cycling, being able to use bike sharing services or being able to use Strava would be important to me on top of trip planning.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk and I wish you all a very successful 2026!