Sailfish Community News, 18th April 2024 - Xperia 10 IV & V

Sailfish OS update from Jolla

When this fortnight goes out, the first Sauna 4.6 release candidate has been in the hands of community beta testers for three weeks. Community beta testers have been exceptionally active. They have reported dozens of problems with the first release candidate. The feedback have been constructive and helpful. Let’s iron out issues from the Sauna release together. As a heads up, the next release candidate is planned for next week.

Same time you, the Sailfish Community, have been eagerly waiting for news regarding Sony Xperia 10 IV and Xperia 10 V support. Earlier this week some of you realized from the docs repository that something is happening. The news is that yes, we will support Sony Xperia 10 IV and Xperia 10 V. Some speculation even started regarding AppSupport. The thing regarding AppSupport is that it will eventually be available for Xperia 10 IV & V but the first version will be without commercial components. The reason for this is that we do have major issues left to tackle like fingerprint is not working, camera is hanging, battery charge level is not reported, just to name a few. We should be getting new binary blobs from Sony soonish and we’re hoping that some of the issues will be fixed there. Same time we’re looking at the issues as well.

We’re not yet ready to publish Xperia 10 IV & V images. However, build instructions you may soon find from docs. Building an image yourself is an option for the ones who’d like to take a sneak peek or even contribute fixes. David (@flypig) wrote his experiences on building Xperia 10 III image. That post should give you insights on how to proceed. The Xperia 10 IV & V images will be first made available for the community beta testers and from there eventually for all users.

Stay tuned!

Energy from the Community

Repository roundup

Most of the changes reported in the last two weeks are changes done in the main branches of each repository. The functionalities for the upcoming version 4.6 have been frozen already and only fixes are done for that version in branches named upgrade-4.6.0.

Communication bits

Navigating the web

Middleware

Low-level libraries

Developer’s corner

App roundup

For reasons best known to the developers themselves, there’s been a bit influx of travel apps to the Jolla Store in the last fortnight. It might be the time of year. As it happens there’s been a big influx of all kinds of apps, but the theme around travel is definitely there. We sadly don’t have the time or space to cover them all in the newsletter, but I hope you’ll agree we’ve picked a nice selection for you to consider.

So let’s get straight into our travel-themed app roundup for this newsletter!

First up is ReisplannerBE from rgrnetalk. This is an alternative version of the Reisplanner, providing information about Belgian railway instead of Dutch railway services. The apps are slightly different: unlike the Dutch version, the BE version doesn’t allow you to specify stations to travel via. On the other hand, the BE version does have English language translations (in addition to Dutch, French and German). And of course, they cover different services, although both do offer long-distance European travel information beyond their respective countries.

Using the app turns out to be straightforward: enter your departure and destination stations from a searchable list, select your departure or arrival date and time, and off you go. A neat icon next to the entries allows you to reverse the entries for your return journey, as well as to check live details about the station (although this only works for certain stations).

The list of departures (or “travel opportunities” as the app rather poetically phrases it) gives all the pertinent info, although you can also get more detail by selecting one of the entries. You can also get earlier or later entries — either from the list or a single entry — from the pull-down menu.

The settings page is particularly nice, allowing you to set your preferred stations as well as a collection of associated options. This is great if you regularly make the same journey: it means the app will open with all of the details set. Perfect when you’re on the move and running late! Select a particular journey and it will even be displayed on the cover screen, so you don’t even need to open the app full screen.

One final neat feature is that the app will also provide details of any advertised disruptions. The latest version brings updated translations and works very nicely and the version number to 0.31. ReisplannerBE is available on the Jolla Store.

Next up is — I have to admit — one of my all-time favourite apps. Pure Maps from rinigus has been directing my movements around the world for many years now and has rarely let me down. It’s a real powerhouse of an app with far too many features to go through here, but in short, if you want a professional, slick and open-source mapping app with features to rival some of the best commercial alternatives then you’re going to like Pure Maps.

Of course, there’s an excellent map viewing capability built off of a variety of interchangeable external services — including MapTiler, MapBox, OpenStreetMap and Here — and solid routing with support for eight different modes of transport. But that’s really just the start. The search options work well, you can set favourites, switch between day and night mode, search for nearby sites using a range of categories, plus configure the app in a million different ways. The app is available from the Jolla Store in a slightly restricted form, so while it will give you all this if you go with the version from OpenRepos or Chum you can also configure voice navigation.

Sailfish OS is blessed with a whole collection of different mapping apps: Pure Maps, OSM Scout, Mæp and modRana, amongst others. They all have overlapping but distinct features and all are worth looking at. If you want to give Pure Maps a go, version 3.3.0 is available from the Jolla Store, OpenRepos and Chum.

If you’re interested to know in exactly where you are, but are less interested in knowing where you’re going, then a simpler approach like that offered by GPSLocator, by Dominic Radermacher (blip), might be for you. It won’t show you a map of where you are, nor will it give you voice directions. But it will give you your latitude, longitude, altitude and everything you could hope to know about the status of your GPS sensors. While it won’t give you a map of the Earth, it will give you a map of the sky and the locations of the GPS satellites within visible range.

In practice, these are the two pages available: a summary page containing the data about your location; and a satellite info map.

Despite this rather minimal approach, it nonetheless supports some nice configuration options. You can configure exactly what information to show on the summary page or on the cover display for example.

Sailfish OS has had a changing relationship with GPS (and particularly AGPS) over the years, not least due to changes to Mozilla’s Location Services. As a result, I’ve always found it helpful to have an app like GPSLocator nearby: it gives real-time information about your GPS status in a way that the pulsating home screen icon simply can’t capture. Version 0.21 is the first to support the QTH Location geocoding system (“Maidenhead Locator”), favoured by HAM radio enthusiasts to succinctly share verbal descriptions of a location as a short sequence of alternating letter-number pairs.

One thing to note is that GPSLocator is only available from the Jolla Store for 64-bit ARM devices, but a 32-bit version is also available from OpenRepos.

Our final app today takes things in a slightly different direction. The apps so far are ideal if you’re travelling. But once you arrive you may find the need to use the ExRates app from Sikarjan. It will seamlessly convert between hundreds of different currencies, ensuring you stick to your budget and don’t get taken for a (metaphorical) ride. The app pulls data from either floatrates.com or exchangerate-api.com. You can select which to use, although I found only float rates was working when I tried.

Some of the thoughtful features of the app include the vivid flags shown next to the currencies in the selectable list, the fact you can reorder the entries in the currency list to push the ones you really need to the top, and the fluidity of the scrollable list of currencies. The latest version 1.7 adds Swedish translations alongside the existing Czech, German, French, Simplified Chinese and English. This great little app is available from the Jolla Store and OpenRepos.

If you’re going on a journey, you won’t find a better companion than Sailfish OS fully loaded with these great travel apps. Thanks to all the developers for their amazing work and updates keeping the apps working and full-featured.

We hope you enjoyed the roundup, we’ll have more in the next newsletter.

Please feed us your news

As always, please do not hesitate to share your ideas, thoughts, or suggestion for future newsletter topics.

Hope you enjoyed reading! Thank you all!

Please do also join us at our community meetings on IRC, Matrix and Telegram. Next community meeting will be on the 25th April.

36 Likes

Thank you for this edition of the Community News. A nice read, as always!

How do I sign up for beta testing? I have just enabled the setting in my Jolla account, then tried Developer Tools | Activate developer updates (or similar) The presented login form did not accept my Jolla credentials.

Am I to receive new credentials for beta testing, or am I missing something else? The old post over at TJC (linked from Jolla Account page) is a little light on details.

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Beta testers are probably a different thing from the Early Access for new releases, right?

Though, I believe I have opted in for Early Access and have been offered those updates OTA in the past, but as of late I don’t remember receiving Early Access. Is Early Access still a thing?

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Correct, beta tester is different than Early Access.

For minor releases we have skipped Early Access but it’s still there.

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Oh, so the community testers mentioned above were “proper beta testers” rather than Early Access testers, as 4.6 isn’t available as Early Access?

I didn’t understand the difference and I’m still not quite sure I get it. Which one is it I signed up for using my Jolla Account? And if, I signed up for Early Access, why couldn’t I enable that in my device’s Developer Tools?

Early Access is accessible to all users that have a Jolla account. You can join in when you click for it in your Jolla account. It is indeed clearly written " Early access to Sailfish OS releases".
This gives access to a sort a pre-final release but not a beta per se. The upcoming 4.6 will be in Early access for a week or two before being released to all users. It often happens that no additional bugs are detected at this stage thanks notably to the work of the other group of testers, the Beta testers.

The actual Beta access is for those who privately signed in for it, either by being selected by Jolla or by sending a message to one sailor where you show your motivation and what you can do to help testing a release. Sailors are part of the group for sure but some community members also, even though there is no public list and very few members indicated they were part of it. Some members are active developers of SFOS applications so that they test (and adjust) their application before the official release.

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Thanks, that seems pretty clear to me.

I wanted to use my non-primary devices to contribute some (granted, last minute) testing, primarily providing feedback about my favourite bugs (hotspot not working, lack of camera access in browser, flightmode killing gps). That puts me in the Early Access category, so I take it my only remaining task is to check for updates regularly.

(Not having the energy to do proper beta testing, I’m infinitely grateful towards those that deal with all the interesting failure modes offered by new software and new devices.)

I couldn’t find this explained in the docs. If I write a summary, where would it fit? Maybe the forum is where it’s most easily found, but docs might be a better place for the information.

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This should probably have been part of my first post, but I took this as a call to action:

…which led me down the path of beta testing vs Early Access confusion.

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OK, so while the 4.6 release for the 10 IV and V is still weeks ahead and won’t contain AppSupport, what are the plans regarding the 10 III? Is the 4.6 release supposed to come out along with 10 IV and V images (i.e. still a matter of weeks) or will it be released any sooner? And, if I understand it correctly, will it contain all the commercial components (including AppSupport) as usual? Thank you.

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Let me clarify plans regarding the 4.6 schedule. It really depends how Xperia 10 IV and 10 V develops.

Best scenario is that 4.6.0 release delivers support for 10 IV and 10 V images at the same time. However, there is no hard connection meaning that 10 IV and 10 V images could be added as minor release on top.

Yes, currently supported devices will contain current commercial components.

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If no AppSupport fro Xperia 10 IV, any chances it will be possible to install it as a second OS? Would love to switch back to SFOS but need to deal with banking / taxi / carsharing / etc apps.

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Excited to hear about Xperia 10 V support. How likely is the XQ-DC72 model (8GB RAM dual-SIM IIUC the differences) to be supported too?

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No support as I can see.

There’s probably a lot more (under the hood) differences then you suggest.

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Model XQ-DC54 would be a good option as well if eSim is supported and works with memory card.
Looking forward.

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Nope, unless you hack it yourself. I don’t believe it’s far that AppSupport other commercial components are available.

Like said stay tuned!

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It’s nice that two apps are featured in this post tgat relay on GPS, but it’s still a problem that GPS doesn’t work properly. Waiting g several minutes to get a signal is much too long, geotagging of photos is impossible that way.
I really hope for a solution of these all-time problems, especially for the announced devices.
And also official support for the newly started Volla Tablet would be cool - or is it that complicated that two european companies team up?

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(also, and)
This appears to be an underlying difference between the stock android GPS and the SFOS GPS (likely from AOSP), from XA2 onwards.
Since afaik it has never actually been acknowledged by Jolla and thus Sony, it is not unlikely that the 10 IV and 10 V will still have this issue too.

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Sure, can wait a bit more, np! But also turns out SFOS still doesn’t support eSIM, which I’m currently using in my Sony Xperia 10 IV… Any plans / ETA on getting it supported? Also, back to dual OS install, can SFOS be installed as second OS is via custom recovery? If possible - I would definitely install it as second OS even without AppSupport / eSIM…

You could maybe write it to the Wiki

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I checked binary files and documentation from Sony and all three versions from XPERIA 10 V have the same chipset and the same firmware files (sources). So XQ-DC52 and XQ-DC72 could be supported very well when one wants to do it. In the last pull request we can see only the european version. It could be a sign. Jolla doesn’t want to support the 8GB RAM version or They added only the european model because of populiarity. The other will be supported too. I need two sim cards and hope this point could be confirmed soon,

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