Sailfish Community News, 30th June, Microtube

Agreed, replacing easily identified and easily reached physical buttons in a car with touch screen buttons buried under several sub menus is backward step so far as safety is concerned. The problem is its cheap. An iPad stuck to the dashboard replacing a dozen physical knobs and buttons, along with the complicated wiring loom that goes with them, costs far less to manufacture, and also far more in customer chargeable parts cost when it goes wrong than replacing a single broken switch. The relentless backwards march of technology!

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But they’ve never said they will be the ones providing the underlying OS. If I understood this correctly that’s the whole point why they’ve spun off the “AppSupport for Linux Platforms” part from the OS.

It may be because they won’t be the ones providing the underlying OS. They want to cash in on the fact that car makers may already have a Linux based OS present in their cars and may want to be able to run some Android apps on top of that.

I’ve just now tried getting it from the Store on an Xperia 10 (armv7hl) and it installed and ran fine for me.
If you have developer access you could try installing it using the console, which should throw up errors if something goes wrong:

devel-su pkcon install harbour-evento
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Thank you for the suggestion. Oddly that just ran through and installed no problem.
I’ll try this first if it happens again for any store apps.

Anyway, much appreciated.

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but clearly not so attractive for developers, as it clearly didn’t attract too much of them to this platform.

I remember how a year or two ago quite many BlackBerry 10 developers were considering Sailfish OS an option to move to after BB10 had been killed off, considering the ease of porting to it their existing BB10 (i.e. Qt) applications.

Just like nearly 10 years earlier, for the same reason, i.e. ease of porting, many Symbian/MeeGo developers went BB10 and kept developing for it for nearly a decade. They went BB10 and not SFOS (which appeared at around the same time) because BB10 did offer them monetization possibilities, while SFOS didn’t.

Almost 10 years have passed since then and the story repeats itself. Of those BB10 developers who were quite seriously thinking about porting their apps to SFOS (which is relatively easy and quick, mostly the GUI), eventually hardly anyone did it due to no monetization possibilities other than asking people for donations (aka “buying a beer”). Majority of those developers decided instead to invest time and effort into completely rewriting their apps for iOS or Android in order to still be able to monetize them.

Majority of applications for BB10 in the BlackBerry World store were priced between $0.99 to $2,99, and very rarely $3,99 which was considered expensive. Yet it was enough to keep many developers support that platform long past it was announced that BB10 days were counted, until RIM eventually closed the store at the beginning of this year.

I don’t know where Jolla’s so apparent reluctance to offer any kind of monetization comes from. They do have a payment mechanism in place that works for buying licences in their “shop” (and formerly also some accessories like TOHs). Maybe it has something to do with them having to pay something for Qt licencing in such case, or something like that. But if so then why not clearly state so.

You can call me a sad f***/person for complaining about it but the amount of donations I’m getting/got for even this complete rewrite of microtube with ground-breaking never-seen-before features is way too underwhelming. And I’m not speaking aobut the amount of money in donation because even stupid 1€ would make me smile that someone appreciates it, and I still appreciate every donation I’ve ever gotten but the amount of donations is waaaay too small for this supposedly “ye i would definitely pay devs to make apps” community.

I can see 2 reasons for this. Either I’m globally hated in the small unprofitable community I’ve chosen to work for (which wouldn’t surprise me) or people are not that willing to donate.

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Name one thing that jolla clearly stated. Remember 4.0 release? xD

Same reason why we didn’t have 1080p+ videos are jolla’s imaginary licensing costs that no matter who you ask they will answer “what, the, hell, are you talking about”

and also above is me backing up my words with actual data. Won’t provide emails with donations because that would be weird to say the least but I’m sure with amount of apps and time i put out in this community people are willing to believe my words :slight_smile:

I guess that the number of voluntary donations (i.e. people paying even though they don’t need to, because the app is freely available regardless of that, which means that pay only those who really want to show you their appreciation) doesn’t necessarily correspond with the number of payments for paid apps (i.e. the apps which wouldn’t be available otherwise, that one has to pay for in order to have it - obviously if we don’t count “piracy”).

All I can say is that on the BlackBerry 10 platform (even in its recent times of fading away) an individual freelance developer with say 10-15 apps could still make a living out of it.

Of course, SFOS is smaller than BB10 was even at its demise, but the question is if it isn’t that small partially because of lack of decent native app portfolio. I.e. a kind of closed circle. I do remember how many BB10 users were talking (e.g. on Crackberry forums) about switching to SFOS after BB10 death. But eventually they were commonly choosing Android or iOS, for their choice of apps.

Anyway, I don’t think that it would hurt anyone if some monetization possibilities were simply present. Those who wouldn’t like to use it simply wouldn’t use it. I can’t see any possible negative impact it might have on those willing to keep releasing free apps. And vice versa. On the N900 and N9 there were both paid apps in the Nokia Store and free apps on maemo.org repos, on TMO forums, etc. and one didn’t in any way contradict the other.

And as Jolla already does have a working payment system used for licence purchases, I guess that it could also work for app purchases. So the problem must be about something different. Possibly some pennies needed to be spent on Qt licencing.

Well, indeed, that’s the sad reality. And it’s probably one of those reasons why it remains such a niche platform. Their strange policy scares people away. Over the years so many developers have left and abandoned many nice projects, and also so many (once devoted and passionate) users (e.g. many of those who were once highly active on TJC) have also given up.

Anyway, I don’t want to make a debate out of this. Maybe it’s already too late. But by not providing any incentives Jolla definitely wasted two great opportunities to attract developers: at the very beginning when Symbian/MeeGo were dying and lots of Qt developers were looking for a new platform to move to (and many of them ended up on BB10 instead), and then recently at BB10 demise when BB10 developers also needed a new destination. So maybe now there’s indeed no one left to attract.

Well, I don’t want to confess details about popularity of my BB10 apps, either. So let me just say that I wasn’t starving during those 7 years :wink: But since switching to SFOS in December 2021, due to absolutely no incentive to do so, I somehow can’t force myself to invest time and effort into porting those apps, so I’m mainly doing stuff for my own needs.

That is correct. If i’ve forced people to pay 2€ then there probably would’ve been more payments, but then again, that’s one time payment

these times are waaaaaaaay gone man imo

but then again, sfos is not bb10 so i would really strongly recomment to not compare them.

Other than that there has been constant decline in sailfishos users. Microtube alone went from haivng 200+ downloads in single day and then 100+ in another to just 150 in two days combined and I really don’t think that’s because it’s getting less popular, i rather bet that sfos is getitng less popular

Sfos is dying, and jolla is killing it - Nietzsche or something

Like, y’all don’t even realise how much freaking BS i had to put up, how much work i had to put up just to override jolla’s bs. Entire reason for complete rewrite is because of outdated Qt. Entire video player is because of jolla’s imaginary licenses. There’s so much work purely because of jolla that’s nuts and no sane person would go through this lengths just to have their app running on sfos.

many, and i say many devs are done putting up with jolla’s bs. Users are leaving because of jolla’s bs too. Every update they break my apps. Sailjail is purely broken and nobody tested it. I myself will leave as soon as i get to redesigning nemo. There’s limited amount of BS that you can put up with.

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What’s wrong with one time payments? A good thing, highly motivating to make new apps, which results in a platform’s app portfolio getting bigger and bigger.

Not that “waaaaaaay gone” as it was even just 1,5 years ago. It suddenly ended only when BlackBerry blocked the store for submitting any new releases in late 2020 or so.

It’s a fact. But what are the reasons? Isn’t lack of high quality native applications one of them?

Well, I for one didn’t download the new version of Microtube due to all that API key hassle. Instead, I made for myself a very simple app converting (using yt-dlp) the youtube link into actual video (or optionally audio) link and opening it for playback in the browser (in Firefox, as the SFOS browser stops playback when the device goes to sleep). So I simply browse the mobile youtube website (m.youtube.com) and just share with my app a link to video I want to watch (using the sharing plugin that my app utilizes), and it does all the rest. Maybe not as elegant as a full-blown youtube client but it just works without any goddamned API keys and provides an entirely ad-free and background playback.

I actually do know. I curse like hell as so many times that I struggle to make something work as intended. My most recent discovery is how idiotic their file pickers are or having just found that I need to use some additional “Keep alive” thing or else timers freeze on device sleep. Every day brings something new :grinning: But at least it’s not boring :wink:

after 5 years you still have that 2$ fron that one person

nope, if anything we got insane amount of high quality native apps recently. better than when i got into sfos over 6 years ago

What API key?

again, what API key? basically what you just did is overcomplicating stuff just not to use microtube lol

bruh, in yottagram, multiple file picker that i’m using is broken, and it’s not because of yottagram, it’s because nobody at jolla decided to test it

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Sorry, somehow I thought (I guess I read somewhere) that it needs that idiotic Youtube API key that many apps (e.g. the Kodi Youtube plugin) need to access youtube. An extremely annoying thing that one needs to generate somewhere on Google Developer portal and then enter from a specific device. If that’s not the case, then I’ll instantly download Microtube!

Maybe it’s just me, but in file picker opened in a preconfigured path (path property set) I just can’t find a way to change that folder by the user from the picker itself. I mean, if the user selects a specific path in the picker, the app remembers it (stores it in QSettings) and next time the picker defaults to that folder for user’s convenience. So far so good. Problems start when the user wants to change that folder, which seems impossible. Another rare phenomenon is no field to enter file name by the user to save a new file, clearly it has to be handled separately. Oh, I miss BB10 pickers so much, they were so nice and functional.

Well, from one sale I wouldn’t expect more than one payment… But I can then make a new app and possibly have that person buy it, too.

Not very exciting, but still better than voluntary donations that rumor has it someone has ever received :wink:

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that’s like… last year news

Oh, and as for broken pickers, maybe I am stupid or something, but in MultiFilePickerDialog used to select multiple files, when I do it (lets say select 4 files), the Accept button changes to “Accept 4”. Nice! But when I press it, instead of accepting the selection and closing the picker it takes me one level higher in directory structure, and so on, until the top. Sometimes it takes pressing that button 5-6 times to eventually leave the picker. Is this thing THAT broken, or WTF???

Well, I don’t follow those things that much. I’m glad that Microtube just works, I’ll install it today.

yup, and it will call “onDone” two times, when you accept and when you leave picker

I guess I’ll make my own then.

Anyway, another topic switched to “slow mode”. Freedom of speech.