New Jolla Phone and new users - how to make life easy for daily users?

Yes and no, forum autofilters, if you come here to post you NEED google wallet and get told NO, you’re out of the forum, don’t believe we should be chasing that user as it’s just not gonna happen (but sure plenty of things that used to be a hard NO are no longer, like BT in appsupport, so wherever possible sure)

you cant compete with android feature wise.
you have to do compromises.
it is too optimistic to think that all of the new users will be happy, a percentage won’t.
and one of them will sell me a almost new c2 (as i cant afford one, after spending 300 bucks on the community phone a year ago) :smiley:
gps and bluetooth should work realibly and browser needs an update.

Same here. I use some Android apps but without MicroG

As SFOS claim to be privacy oriented, literary nothing should be pre-installed. Well, the most basic things might be pre-installed, such as the camera app, messaging client, email, and app store.

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I have AAS, in case of need. But almost never use it, finally.

This can be very relative.

Fringe:
What I like with SFOS is that there is room for the fringe.
I’d wish new users are all from different fringes. A huge fringe meeting!
Rather than another compromised giant imitating a model to grab a part of the success pie.

Utility:
The utility for me is not needing my smartphone too much. I like having no notifications, no alerts. Just silence and peace and control, until I decide to make mess, noise and music.

Apps, apps, apps:
I do banking on my PC. It is never urgent enough for me to need doing payments on an escalator or a ski lift. (still need an app? → I’d change bank)

So, why not easy Android access. Why not, as a gateway to SFOS, as a honeypot. But not as a goal in itself.
Can’t say better than

Voila, just to say other points of view exist, other priorities, other realities…

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I try to live with as few apps notifying me as possible, but the important ones (Signal and WhatsApp to a lesser extend) notify me fine.

To reply to another subject: I think if the number of users for SFOS would grow then the number of native apps would grow as well. AAS helps with that.

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I pushed everything was my life that cannot be done with a standard browser (running on debian). By this I also made myself independent from any apps and google or general platform dependency. If my bank does not permit operations to be done with a standard browser in Debian Linux, I will switch to another bank. Same for all other stuff. Following this logic to be independent from platforms, SFOS needs a highly performant browser to compensate the need for many apps…
Maybe this rationale is true for some of the new phone orders? Can a current and performant browser compensate for missing apps?

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G-store is default and has 99% of anything anyone could want to install. F-droid is for those especially interested. In Sailfish it is the opposite. There is a big difference.

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I think the paper that goes with the phone should point to this forum the newbie section.

We already have threads for newbies but maybe not that visible.

Jolla store would need a clean up and more apps.

Is there maybe a simple way to have chum apps easy propagated to jolla store ?

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The only thing I need android apps for is messengers. Therefor it would be nice to have signal (hail to whisperfish) and threema running. But since there is probably not much to convince the Threema guys…

Oh well, Bluetooth must be reliably working (for pairing with my car audio) and I would be really happy to see all the functions related to that working, like a continuously updated recent calls list (seems only to be updated on initial pairing with my Xperia V) - very annoying right now.
An updated browser would be nice, but this is discussed elsewhere enough.

PureMaps was a mess to install and have it working with voice.

Personally I wouldn’t need anything else.

I would love to get my apps on the Jolla store, but anything but the simplest app simply doesn’t pass the extremely strict rules.

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I’ve been using SFOS for a few weeks now on an Xperia 10iii coming from GrapheneOS and having used a OnePlus 6 running postmarketos for a while as well. So, I’m a new user but a tinkerer and linux enthusiast. I ordered the J2 (first batch).

My observations from my experience (some of these things have been mentioned aready). The UI is the best mobile UI I have worked with so far (no iOS experience however) and you can use SFOS as a reliable daiy driver, which is not the case (yet) for other mobile linux systems. But then, there are obvious issues:

  1. Multiple stores and setting them up (chum / open repos) is a challenge. To make things worse, your average user is not famiiar with f-droid or aurora store either.
  2. Having been featured by linmob for my work on pmos setup videos, I’m deeply ashamed to admit that it took me weeks to figure out how to use emojis on SFOS. ;-). So for a few weeks, I looked like a grumpy old git to the outside world due to the absence of any signs of digitally expressed empathy in my interactions ;-). But this goes to show that this feature is set up in a way that is counterintuitive.
  3. I kept having problems with mobile data and had to reboot quite often or restart the networking subsystem several times a day. I worked out that I had to manually adapt the APN settings.
  4. Banking apps: I shall say no more… My banking app (KBC Belgium) won’t work even when using microg.

These issues combined with BT support in Android apps would be major roadblocks for your average user coming from android or iOS.

And the list goes on, but affects more advanced users:

  1. The browser is outdated, no adblock… On any other mobile OS I use my browser (Firefox or Cromite) to circumvent the lack of native apps, which is is not always possible on SFOS.
  2. Multimedia support: even using android apps, I can’t watch public Belgian television for example due to lack of widevine support.
  3. From a postmarketos perspective: flatpak support would be nice to install Kodi for example, which can help you circumvent the lack of missing native mutimedia apps.

After a few weeks, I have managed to iron out most of the problems (except for banking and some multimedia stuff), and had a great time doing so. But when you think about the lenghts I had to go to (setting up VPN and wireguard, fixing ivp6 dns leaks, enabling adblock using custom dns servers, installing Angelfish and kodi from obs, fixing APN settings, running Firefox with mobile config in an arch container with widevine enabled, having some sort of Nextcloud data syncing using syncthing,…) you realise that attracting “normal people” and tech-savvy users alike is a big challenge to say the least.

The most important thing to address these issues is creating easily accessible howtos and setup guides / tutorials. The SFOS community is great and helpful. But at the moment, the bits and pieces of information you need are scattered all over the place…

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But i lot of these Banking apps are using the Play Integrity API, if they do so then the app will not start.

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It is cheap, as in free beer, and easy. The restrictions that are in place can be and are being worked on. The entry gate to publishing apps is much lower than it is with Android or IOs. I’m not sure I know what you mean, other than allowing more libraries in harbour?

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It’s something the Sailmates have picked up with Books | SailfishOS community wiki But we don’t promote agressively enough. Obviously the forum is full of info, but a structured approach is what we were aiming for …

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You don’t seriously expect normal Play Store access, do you?

Sure, emojis always on a separate menu would be nicer, but it’s not that bad.

Really unlucky, but be sure to contribute your changes then!

That’s on them for mistaking proper googliness for security, is it not?
Still a lot better than all other proper Linuxes, no?

Yawn.

Contributions very much welcome.

Public TV with hard DRM, what a wonderful public service.

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You might want to circumvent the browser issues by using fennec or Firefox from fdroid.

Which APN settings did you change and how did you find out?

@attah He is the other kind of noob. Don’t be grumpy, pls. :slightly_smiling_face:

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@attah I didn’t want to come across as someone who hates SFOS and wants to rub dedicated people like yourself up the wrong way. The reverse is true. SFOS has become some sort of a hobby lately for me and it’s been growing on me to the extent that I spend far too much time tinkering. But if you look at things from the perspective of I guess more than 90% of phone users with the main goal of having an out-of-the-box experience and expecting convenience, you need to be realistic about hopes and dreams of SFOS becoming a true alternative for a larger audience.

Anyway, to stay on topic, my point is that new users would benefit a lot from accessible and comprehensive setup guides. And in order to do that, you have to be able to see things from a layman’s perspective.

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@WT.Sane I have AAS switched off all the time, unless I absolutely need a no native app. Coming from pmos with proper linux Firefox I’m spoilt in that regard. I can live with Angelfish and the native browser though. I always have Cromite or Fennec as a last resort.

APN: I just went to my provider’s website and compared the settings they use in their guides to the ones that were being used by SFOS. For some reasons, the settings didn’t match. So I stuck to mobile vikings’ instructions and now it works. So, just common sense and nothing worth writing a guide for, I guess.

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As a new user the situation with multiple app stores seems like a good opportunity to streamline the user experience.

It would be nice to have a single app store for all sailfish and android apps.

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