Sailfish OS update from Jolla
Community News is back! While many things happened over the summer, we have also had a well deserved summer break. And on top all, we have enjoyed excellent weather here in Finland during July!
Community meeting also returns to the normal rhythm and the next one takes place 14th August.
We had a great community event on July 2, which is covered in detail in the Energy from the Community section below. Importantly, during the event we also announced that we’d like to define the next gen Jolla Phone together with the community and thus the below questionnaire was pushed out last Friday:
And wow what an overwhelming response it has got in less than a week - 600+ votes, 250+ comments, 4.5k views, 1000+ likes and counting! Plenty of returning forum users which we have not seen in a while, totally new users and returning Jolla fans all the way from the good’old Jolla 1 days. We plan to keep the questionnaire open for 1-2 weeks from now on. Meanwhile, if you haven’t yet shared your views, please go and vote, we’d love to hear as many views as possible!
There is also a lot of forum discussion, understandably, in regards Sony Xperia 10 IV/V status. The information is somewhat scattered in various posts and comments, thus we plan to make a dedicated summary post in regards and the next steps. Those concerned, kindly hold your thought for a second, stay tuned for our summary post and let’s continue discussion there!
Finally, in this fortnight we have a new section called Harbour news and today it’s authored by @vige. A repository roundup style update but about Jolla Store apps. We also have the Repository roundup back from vacation big thanks to @dcaliste.
Please enjoy the fortnight!
Energy from the Community
We hosted a great Jolla Community Event on July 2 @ Tampere Plevna. The discussion was extremely lively and close to 100 persons joined both onsite and online! We should definitely organize similar events more frequently. Thank you everybody who joined, and in particular for the lively discussion. This gives also us here in Jolla a lot of energy to keep going!
At the beginning of the event Antti shared the route to Mind2 Beta & showed a demo. We announced that we are building a multi platform desktop (electron) app to connect to Mind2. Further, a mobile app will be created as an activity done together with the community – in a way a community project. Find more a deeper look to the details from Antti’s post on Discord.
Open souring first steps were shared and discussed:
Open sourcing phase 1 - Q3/25
- Selected components to help device porting
- Device encryption components
- Accounts plug-ins, excluding Microsoft 365
- Device side MDM API
- Camera & Gallery apps
- The (in)famous Weather app
- Notes app
We have since started the execution, opened the first repos and will continue opening during the Q3. We will be steering the next phases after the Q3 steps based on the feedback, areas of interest and activities within the projects.
SUG Bremen
Finally, there’s a Sailfish OS Community Meeting taking please in Bremen next Monday. Please join if you happen to be around.
Repository roundup
Development was not completely stopped during July and one can notice the various package fixes to allow the future arrival of GCC 15. In August, it restarted quickly. I let you also discover the name of the coming release while reading repository changes…
Main interface
sailfish-nfcshare, a share plugin using NFC, pvuorela is proposing to use the theme icons for the sharing plug-in.
Navigating the web
sailfish-browser, the browser application itself, ichthyosaurus fixed a positioning issue of the menu icon when looking at theabout:page. He also proposed to use a dialog when clearing private data, instead of a button in a page. In addition, he suggested the addition of an entry in the menu to clear all data. It was commented that the menu is already quite crowdy, making new additions only possible for widely used actions.
Network, communication and telephony stack
messagingframework, the email Qt framework, dcaliste updated the code to use standard Qt logging category, replacing specific code initially developped for the project. He moved some code regarding disposition notification mechanism and reply references from the QML bindings to upstream.nemo-qml-plugin-email, QML bindings for emails, dcaliste updated the attachment plugin to use standard Qt logging routines. He also moved some code to create read receipt to upstream and adjusted the QML plugin accordingly. He opened a draft to discuss how to implement email aliases. The proposition relies on group emails as supported upstream in QMF. But it still requires some noticeable changes in the QML bindings and in the UI code. He opened a second draft to also discuss the possibility to use the same strategy than in Thunderbird regarding the discovery of email server settings.
Calendar stack
kf5-calendarcore, the KDE framework library to handle calendar data, dcaliste modified upstream how recurrence ids are stored when changing the starting date of a recurring event. This fixes an issue with exceptions disappearing from the calendar when changing the starting date of the series (it should also help with sync issues of such series). pvuorela had to remove the-Werrorcompilation flag from the QML bindings since the latest upstream now deprecates the notebook support within a calendar.
Low level libraries
droidmedia, Android media wrapper library, muhammad23012009 added support forsensorserviceand IStats AIDL HAL. rinigus mentioned that it allows to make one camera of the three to work on Xperia 1iv and 5iv. mal added a fakepackage_mativeservice, as needed for video recording on Android newer than 12. NotKit added support for Android newer than 12 inminimediaservice. It has already been used by Halium for a while.pam, an extensible library which provides authentication for applications, mal updated it to 1.7.1.libblockdev, a library for low-level manipulation with block devices, mal moved it to version 3.3.1.openssl, utilities and library for cryptography, mal updated to 3.2.4. keto stripped down the compatibility package providing the old version 1.1. The harbour rules have been updated to allow current 3.x versions and deprecate older 1.1 series. The changes may come with OS version 5.1.libarchive, a library to handle compressed formats, mal updated it to 3.8.1.sensorfw, sensor framework, mal is working on adding support for Android AIDL binder interface. This will provide compatibility with more recent Android devices.aspell, a spell checker, mal backport a fix for gcc 15 compilation issue.cpio, GNU archiving program, mal addedgnu17standard flag allowing smooth compilation with GCC 15.db4, the Berkeley DB database library, mal fixed a build issue with GCC 15 and applied a patch from OpenSUSE fixing a CVE.sharutils, the GNUsharutilities for managing shell archives, mal fixed another build issue with GCC 15.gmp, the GNU multiprecision library, mal backported a fix for compiling with GCC 15.sqlite, an embeddable SQL database engine, mal updated it to 3.50.4.poppler, the PDF rendering library, mal updated it to version 25.07.0.ngfd, the non graphical feedback daemon handling sound and vibration feedback, spiiroin fixed heap corruption issues.libaccounts-glib, a library to handle online-service accounts, pvuorela updated it and provided a patch fixing the signaling of theenabledproperty on accounts.sailfish-version, versioning package for Sailfish OS, the package has been added to Github recently as a newly open-sourced package. We can learn from it that coming version 5.1 will be called Pispala.
Developer’s corner
sb2-tools-template, scratchbox2 cross compilation tools, mal added x86_64 architecture.util-linux, a collection of basic system utilities, keto added missing link to/bin/login.gcc, the GNU compiler collection, keto fixed a dependency issue withlibgccon newerglibc, so the package updates are done in a proper order. See also, the corresponding merge request inglibc.readline, a library for editing typed command lines, mal updated it to 8.3.git, the famous version control, mal updated it to 2.50.1.nemo-qml-plugin-dbus, the QML bindings for DBus, nephros updated the documentation, providing examples and clarifying sentences.scratchbox2, the cross-compilation tool used by the SDK, based on the work from krnlyng, Thaodan completely reworked how syscalls are forwarded. He also worked on makingscratchboxusing the native binaries (and notqemuemulation) when compiling for the same architecture than the host.
Harbour news
Today we are starting a new section in the community newsletter: Harbour News. The idea is to provide repository roundup -style update on what is happening on the Jolla Store: Are there new applications, and what applications have received updates. Occasionally we might also write longer reviews, if any of the authors feels like it 
To start this thing off with a bang, here is the summary of the changes that happened during July. As you can see, quite a few app maintainers have spent their summer polishing the apps. At the time of writing there is still quite a long queue at the Harbour QA, so we already know there will be plenty of updates in the next newsletter as well!
MpvQML - movie player based on MPlayer and mplayer2
MpvQML update added gestures for changing volume, brightness and seek: swiping up and down on the left part of the screen adjusts volume, swiping up and down elsewhere adjusts brightness, and swiping left and right seeks.
MeeCast - weather forecast application
MeeCast received new hours forecast URL for gismeteo.ru source.
Captain’s Log - diary application
Captain’s Log received updated translations for Chinese, Estonian, Finnish, Russian, Swedish, Tamil and Ukrainian
File Browser
File Browser added a new popup when starting the app inside SailJail - guiding the user to install non-sandboxed version from OpenRepos. Also some visual glitches were fixed and translations updated for Estonian, Slovak, Swedish and Ukrainian.
Expenditures
Expenditures is an app for tracking and splitting bills. It received updated translations for Estonian, Swedish and Ukrainian, along with some “minor packing changes” - which to my eye look like updated Opal library.
地铁查询Metro Routes
Metro route app received updated Guangzhou Metro database, version 20250629.
Greed
A new puzzle game has arrived in Harbour! Well, an old game, but nevertheless. The object of Greed is to erase as much of the screen as possible by moving around in a grid of numbers. When you move in a direction, you erase N number of grid squares in that direction, N being the first number in that direction. Your score reflects the total number of squares eaten.
ColorTubes
Another new puzzle game! There can never be too many of these. In this game your goal is to sort the colors in the tubes so that each tube contains only one color. Surprisingly addictive!
AllRadio2
AllRadio2 is AllRadio revived: easy to use radio player for online streaming radio. It comes with pretty much all the features one could imagine: searching through all the radio stations the Internet has to offer, saving favourite channels, video (for those radio stations which offer video) and whatnot.
Lone Wolf
And another game! This time it’s not a puzzle, but an adventure game. It’s adapted from a book series of the same name. Playing with a Sailfish device provides some improvements when comparing to playing with a book: You don’t have to keep score using a pencil and a paper as the game provides a functionality for that. It’s not automated and you yourself are responsible for not cheating, so the experience is still quite close to the actual book.
Nitroxy
Nitroxy is a nitrox gas mix calculator for SCUBA divers. The main new feature in the latest update is German translations. The new version also allows all orientations, and includes other minor UX improvements.
NedNieuws
NedNieuws is a reader application for the Dutch news services NOS. In the latest version the link highlight colour has been changed to follow the system theme.
Please feed us your news
Hope you enjoyed reading this community newsletter and feel the excitement! As always, please do not hesitate to share your ideas, thoughts, or suggestions for future newsletter topics. This is your news!
Please also join us at our community meetings on IRC, Matrix and Telegram. The next community meeting after summer break will be on the 14th August.