Apparently - thanks to the huge success of the new Jolla Phone campaign - at least some, if not many first time user are going to use Sailfish OS.
At least some of them may find for instance installing and setting-up MicoG or other apps - or even finding repositories and apps - challenging. However, some Android Apps users are used to may require MicroG (since I myself installed MicroG on all of my SFOS devices I do not know what might not work without MicroG)
So this is the pleading: Please make it as easy as possible for first time users to install everything needed and to set-up the device for daily use. I do not know whether it is feasible to have for instance, Open repos, Chum, Aurora store and MicroG preinstalled.
This might be crucial to avoid disappointments and frustration as good as possible.
An easy start and a positive user experience will help SFOS thriving
EDIT (after reading many helpful posts): instead of having additional stores and AAS pre-installed, a good set-up wizard that gives the user a choice might be a better alternative - so the additional stores, AAS etc. would be installed automatically upon a user’s choice, but only to the extent a user wants
Aren’t notifications relying on GMS/MicroG in most applications?
It depends on the bank. Some banks, especially UK-based ones such as Revolut might not work at all. At the same time bunq even give you rich API access, which allows everything except 3D Secure, so you do not even need Android App Support (since 3DS is available in the web app).
Should not, but unfortunately they mostly prefer security theater
Fully agree - I wish we had native apps for everything. However, without a broader user base there will not be enough incentive for developing SFOF apps - therefore, the abilty to use Android Apps is a must for everyday users.
I have a few specific examples of things that I think should be dealt with before the J2 is released:
if you don’t have AAS installed yet, and have no idea that you need to do that, trying to download F-Droid from the Jolla Store seems to be broken for no reason. an error message should be added
the weather app needs to be fixed (!!!)
multiple app stores should really not be necessary and will cause confusion for newbies. Jolla Store needs to drop some restrictions and make it free/very very very cheap to upload an app. Mister Magister has talked about this in-depth
the built-in tutorial needs to cover more things, like the fact that you can jump using the bar that appears on the right when scrolling. I’ve been using SFOS for two years and only just found out about that in August
the SFOS website has outdated and incorrect information
There’s probably more but I can’t think of them off the top of my head.
The fact that there are 3 stores is very confusing. Since I do some banking on my phone I need to trust the apps I install. It is much easier for me to trust the Jolla store. Sadly the apps I use the most like Whisperfish and now SailPipe are not there.
I don’t think users should be expected to download a second or an rpm file just to get signal.
Both fdroid and aurora are offered on initial setup (at least on XV) and both showed up eventually (after restart)
It won’t, Meecast fixes that
They are necessary, in theory you could expand the ‘allow untrusted software’ option in settings to have one-click install of OR/chum, but it’s risky, currently the scare-banner is there and user is responsible for sourcing their own malware, Jolla giving one-click option to get malware (OR allows closed source blobs, super easy, but chum can also offer it, see vibecoded adblock systemd implementation leading to bootloop, or it can sneak in like xz, or it can be advertised as a feature of your npm autoupdating app, the MM above), completely different than just letting you pwn your phone yourself with random rpms. Rather push for your must-have software from these stores to conform to harbour standards (or to increase allowed apis in harbour) so casual user won’t screw himself just from clicking in jolla provided core apps and harbour will have a way to maybe catch malicious devs (or accidentally malicious)
Once I got my Jolla C2 last year, I tried to use only the Jolla Store apps, but this did not take long because it lacks many good apps available in Chum and the Storeman app store.
While Meecast is a very nice weather app, I still miss the unique design of the Jolla Weather app.
The weather app got open sourced, there was one guy working on getting yr.no as a provider, but I believe he’s waiting for qml xhr to allow setting custom useragent, maybe 5.1, if he’s still around
What? In the Android world one has the G-Store, F-Droid, NeoStore, and some more, plus the GrapheneOS Store for GOS users. Where’s the problem, if the user has a choice in what shop to ‘buy’/download? Also like in real life I wouldn’t want only one supermarket to buy everything.
