Paid subscription to updates

Platform Development
#258

What you want is the Location feature of Android/iOS. It’s a very complex mix of Wi-Fi SSID, Cell Towers ID and a bit of GPS. What SFO has, is basic GPS and MLS (discontinued this year). It’s slow to get a fix, that by design, no Jolla fault here. At Jolla size a can’t really build something better and with privacy.

It’s in the work, slowly built by the community. Issues · sailfishos/droidmedia · GitHub

Take a look at Flypig blog, it’s a very complex and lengthy process Gecko-dev Diary
Now, to be fair, SFO should be running Qt6 and have a browser built with it.

The issue is Bluez, it’s bad Bluetooth stack, but it’s the only one that works.

1 Like
#259

And just think about what people are going mad about.
How many times did app support got updated the last 6-7 years? I remember 2 and I am also counting the one that will come after summer.

#260

3 if they didn’t skip any major versions. Not that skipping a version is necessarily bad…

#261

Hey, thanks for your reply.
Sure, I know about this work and its great. I wanted to express that I expect jolla to provide these elementary features as part of the licence fees and not the community

2 Likes
#262

You really do not understand, but it is OK. It is not about the 5€/month. It is about the competitiveness, the attitude etc.
Also I am not sure that this getting update if you pay and no update if you do not pay, would legally hold, because of the copy rights and risk if they leave the software without patches.
As I said before I feel used by Jolla, because they count me as paying for a license, so that they can lure investments and in the same time the OS is getting worse and worse, while they are insisting that it is getting better. Take VoLTE as an example. The SFOS is meant to be a mobile phone OS, correct? So it should be priority #1 to provide this feature to customers - and we are discussing here for 3rd year already this issue and it is still not working. Can’t you just leave everything else, do the work, close this topic and move forward with the rest?
What about the cooperation in India, in Brazil, in Russia … big words, got the money, failed and nothing. The 5€ per update will not cover the costs, you need market development strategy, big investments and above all a market. After 10y I started loosing fate.

So my conclusion is, that Jolla is not interested in developing a product or delivering to customers, but rather luring more and more investments (cause this is cool, you get money, promise something and deliver nothing - it is called scheme).

2 Likes
#263

It is clear that the old business model didn’t work. So they are trying something else. Will it make OS better? Maybe, maybe not. If the business plan does not work, it for sure does not get better.

People hoping for Jolla to die so that Sailfish becomes FOSS is just utopia as well. Some company will buy the closed assets if the company goes bankrupt and probably use them for some closed source product. Then Sailfish just does not exist anymore.

The very reason why things like VoLTE has been ignored is exactly the old license model. It would be finished already if it generated any meaningful revenue. No company would ignore vast majory of their customers if not working on something made a dent in their business. Same reason why Qt was never upgraded: it made no business sense. The actual customers prioritized/wanted something else.

So you either choose to support Jolla with their new business model, do not use paid features, or move on. I personally made an ultimatum that I would not use sailfish until the Qt stack is updated. I intend to keep that promise.

If they suddenly do it, I am happy to shove some 5euros to their direction and maybe buy some Xperia to run it with.

And to be honest, the raise of AI might be a great opportunity for Linux based phone. If you have the hardware to run the basic models, more open system than iOS or Android will allow you to do many cool things.

6 Likes
#264

So why don’t they finally try other existing possibilities after so many years of ignoring them: enable paid applications in Jolla store (on which they might be taking some 30-40% commission), offer paid apps themselves (e.g. make Weather a paid app to fully cover its API cost + earn some on it), provide some paid services (e.g. prioritized helpdesk support), etc. Plenty of possibilities, ignored for years.

Switching from one-time purchase to subscriptions alone won’t give anything with such a tiny user base. What increase of revenue can one expect from probably just a FEW THOUSAND of paying users? 100,000€ more a year? I’m not sure if its enough to cover one good developer’s yearly salary. It would work with hundreds of thousands of paying users, not with just thousands. Waste of time, only putting people off.

If there were subscriptions rather than one-time payments, would it have generated any seriously higher revenue from the same group of a few thousand of paying people since they introduced VoLTE beta on the 10 III, i.e. some 1,5 years ago? How much more? 150,000€ as I wrote earlier?

And one final question: how much of those monthly payments will be eaten by the companies and/or banks involved in handling and processing those thousands of payments month by month? How much tax and/or other fees will be in each such monthly payment that Jolla won’t get? Will what remains be worth it?

3 Likes
#265

Today’s fortnight has a Q&A section clarifying repeatedly asked questions. Please give a look!

9 Likes
#266

Sorry, not the topic here, but now that I get a better view of how VoLTE is working, I think this sentence is incorrect. To work, on Qualcomm SoC, VoLTE requires the following:

  1. a mbn file provided by Qualcomm. It contains the configuration for the modem to handle VoLTE as implemented by the network providers. So actually, this file is designed by the providers themselves, with Qualcomm engineers, for their setup. There is a (very) long list of parameters, including for instance how to handle SMS when using the IMS for VoLTE… One wrong value on a parameter and it’s not working. Of course, it’s SoC dependant, in addition to being network provider dependant.
  2. a link in OEM partition, provided by Sony, that associate the service ID of your provider to the right mbn file.
  3. a oFono plugin to allow to talk to the modem via the IMS stack.
  4. a bit of middleware to switch from classical GSM stack to the IMS one.

Obviously, Jolla implemented 4., and created also 3. (closed source ;…( but I didn’t notice bugs there). Jolla developpers helped Sony with 2., with the help of the community to associate service ID to mbn files. So far, there is no issues related to these points. But remains point 1. And this, no one can do anything about it except the network providers and Qualcomm. There is no documentaion on the Internet, only very few resources to parse and generate mbn blob files. And there are many, many parameters, all of them undocumented with arbitrary values like 1, 3, 7… Guess what they mean.

If you have a good mbn file, VoLTE is working quite well. If you don’t, you may have voice but no SMS, you may have phone calls but no voice… I’m afraid Jolla did their maximum on that topic: middleware and modem access. The issues are in the implementation of VoLTE in the modem. It requires too many parameters that are out of reach if you’re not a Qualcomm engineer working with a network provider engineer.

25 Likes
Xperia III, IV, or V What is the best phone for Sailfish OS with VoLTE
#267

Whoa. Thanks a lot for this, this is the best summary of the situation I’ve read so far.

1 Like
#268

If I were capable of developing a good app, I would hesitate to publish it as a paid version in the store because of people crying: “I paid 0.79€ four years ago for this app, why can’t the f*****g developer keep updating it forever and fix this incredible bug!!!”

5 Likes
#269

Jolla has tried this before with Flattr and it did not work… The problem is that there is no suitable paying system for small amounts. Paypal is quite obsolete (you don’t want to support Peter Thiel’s spying tools). Perhaps in the future there will be a European paying system.

#270

It’s a licensing, shop and quality & support issue.
The latter is the biggest problem. I’ve suggested selling App Support as is ie warn users that only Sony X phones are supported.

We don’t know if they still have to pay Myriad. Remember Jolla was broke & under administration then working primarily for Rostelcom then under administration again. Both times under administration, they probably had ~3 full time staff.

1 Like
#271

Today’s fortnight has a Q&A section clarifying repeatedly asked questions.

It’s short already but:
Permanent license will be available.
App Support won’t be disabled (contrary to anything said previously)
Older phones won’t be dropped quickly.

2 Likes
#272

I don’t think we said anywhere that it will be disabled.

2 Likes
#273

I guess that you can always simply clearly state in the licence agreement and in the app description what kind of support (including its duration) your application comes with. Then you simply respect your own terms, i.e. provide good support within that period, and after it expires you’re free to ignore future demands or complains. Or you can voluntarily continue your support beyond that period. I’ve had multiple paid applications first in the Ovi/Nokia store (both for Symbian and Harmattan), then in BlackBerry World, and I’ve never had any major issues with any users, so I don’t think that such complaints can be considered a valid excuse for not having support for paid applications at all.

1 Like
#274

I based my numbers on what is available through the Sony Open Device Program (on which SFOS is based).

Qualcomm is trying to get into general compute with the Snapdragon X where good driver support is more important, hopefully that will trickle down/up to the cellphone processors as well.

https://developer.sony.com/kernel-version-for-maintained-devices/
https://developer.sony.com/kernel-version-for-legacy-devices

#275

Well those numbers don’t really say what you think they do. Out of all five the Xperia 10 devices only a single one has ever had its kernel updated.

As for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X series, their focus is on pre-assembled all-in-one Windows devices and them only. They’re providing drivers to Microsoft, but we don’t know how that differs from what they’re doing on Android. There’s no support for Android or Linux on Snapdragon X. Linux currently supports the chips from Apple that the Snapdragon X series is trying to compete with than the “general compute” Snapdragon X.

#276