Sailfish OS update from Jolla
The last fortnight newsletter of the month of February. Today we have Community meeting summary, Harbour news and Repository roundup by @pherjung, @vige and @dcaliste respectively.
We just had an excited and inspiring two-day hackday here in Tampere. We are preparing a separate Jolla Phone update out of those two days and that post should be going out soon. Target is that this post would be also a more technical update. A small teaser from the hackday.
Update the lights on topic
On Friday 6th February we released Sailfish OS 5.0.0.73 to early access. Usually we do not publish a release right before weekend but this time we did. Generally speaking the update was well taken and you, Sailfish Community, had a great discussion in the release topic during the weekend. Thank you all for your feedback.
The major highlight there is that AppSupport is now updated to Android version 13 and available also for Xperia 10 II and Xperia 10 III. We are working on AppSupport Bluetooth which we aim to publish via Jolla Store as a separate installable package. One was commenting about the version number and why this is not a Sailfish OS 5.0.1. Well, that is a fair question. Simple answer is that this is how build count is treated i.e. how version number gets bumped up. Feel free to treat this as 5.0.1 
as it is quite a big update. Hopefully we get this soon rolled out to public.
Some of you noted earlier that Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) protocol version 16.1 would be needed from 1st March 2026 onwards. We have been working on the protocol version update and we are happy to say that it is almost ready. This protocol update implies that there will be at least one Sailfish OS 5.0 update after 5.0.0.73. Then we move towards releasing Sailfish OS 5.1. As of today, we have not yet branched Sailfish OS 5.1 but it is looking rather good and is almost feature complete. 
Please enjoy and keep sailing! 
Community meeting summary
At the last meeting, there were five sailors and three community members present.
Will the Jolla Phone (2026) have HBM (high brightness mode)?
@MeeGo-Junky requested HBM support for the new Jolla Phone. A technical forum post with further information is currently in preparation. For HBM, there is an improvement PR being prepared: [display] Fix HBM and make it's path configurable by Michal-Szczepaniak · Pull Request #41 · sailfishos/mce · GitHub.
Unreliability of Android apps in secondary user accounts
@catonyourcomputer noticed that some Android apps are unreliable in secondary user accounts.
As development of this feature began around 2020, the requirements were different, meaning Android apps won’t show for additional users.
Later, AppSupport was changed to be user-specific. However, work still needs to be done to implement new features, such as allowing additional users to install Android apps.
Harbour news
The Harbour queue is still quite long, i.e. around three weeks. Please stay patient!
Mælstrøm
Mælstrøm is Magic Wormhole client. It makes it possible to transfer arbitrary-sized files and directories (or short pieces of text) from one computer (or phone in our case) to another. This is the first Harbour release of the app, but it seems to be quite capable already: You can send and receive files and text easily and it can produce QR codes for easily setting up the connection.
File Browser
File Browser was updated to version 3.8.1. The changes include:
- Fixed date formats being incorrectly translated; dates should be formatted more naturally now
- Fixed dconf issues after running File Browser in Root Mode
- Updated Opal modules, fixing some visual glitches and adding translations
- Various UI fixes here and there
- Added translations: Bengali, Chinese (Taiwan), Hindi, Malayalam, Persian, Portuguese, Thai, Vietnamese
- Updated translations: Czech, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Indonesian, Norwegian BokmĂĄl, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian
WORDLE
Wordle is a (can we already say classic?) word guessing game. Version 1.1.9 brings improved Settings panel landscape layout and miscellaneous UI tweaks and fixes. Ukrainian and Russian dictionaries were updated.
Spliit
Spliit is an unofficial SailfishOS client for Spliit - an open source minimalist application to track and share expenses with your friends and family. This is the first Harbour release and some of the functionalities must still be done with the web client. With the app it is possible to join several groups and switch between them and add expenses. The app supports multiple currencies.
PikeFight
PikeFight is GPS Map app for fishing and creating catch documentation markers of points of interests. Version 1.5.5 brings following improvements:
- Elevation displayed together with position
- Download map data for offline use in settings page
- UV index sunrise and sunset in weather info
- Map for bottom composition hard to soft (zoom >=14)
- Overlay of composition in sea charts
- Magnify with pinch instead of + and - buttons - bugfix for center on tracks
Watchlist
Watchlist is an app for tracking stocks. Version 0.13.8 is a bugfix release, fixing search for ING backend. Also the user agent string was updated to match latest Firefox.
Tooterβ
Tooter received a big version jump to version 1.3.0. Here’s what’s new:
- edit toot
- slideshow of more than one image in a toot
- mini previews of links where possible
- quote toots
- proper multi-person response
- alt text for media uploads
- polls are visible
- a new Finnish translation
- fix for deduplication
- fix for minor profile bug
- a number of potential race conditions
- other !
Repository roundup
Network, communication and telephony stack
net-tools, basic networking tools, includingifconfig,netstat,route, …, mal added symlinks in/sbinonifconfigandroutefor backward compatibility.nemo-qml-plugin-email, QML bindings for emails, pvuorela cleanup parts of the code and removed themailserverrole from the account list model. This was supposed to take the server part of the email address but was working only for.comdomains. Obviously, it was unused.wpa_supplicant, a set of tools to allow connections to WPA protected wifi networks, mal fix connecting issues on WLAN with kernels older than 3.16.connman, the connection manager, LaakkonenJussi worked on adding WPA3 SAE support. This also requires to add support in the GLib clientlibgsupplicant.messagingframework, the email Qt framework, pvuorela fixed some initialisation issues.
Multimedia
imagemagick, a multi-purpose image manipulation tool, mal updated it to 6.9.13.38.libpng, the library to read Portable Network Graphic formats, mal updated it to 1.6.55.
Low level libraries
expat, an XML parser library, mal updated it to 2.7.4.openssl, utilities and library for cryptography, direc85 proposed to update to 3.5, which is an LTS version with end of life in 2030.firejail, the isolation mechanism for process from the host system, direc85 updated it to 0.9.78. He also adjusted some rule insailjail-permissionsthat became default infirejail.
Developer’s corner
initrd-helpers, convenient scripts to be used to generate the kernel init ram disks, mal added the possibility to find partitions under/dev/sd[a-z], while it was previously restricted to/dev/sda.
Please feed us your news
Hope you enjoyed reading this fortnight!
This is a community update, and frankly we can’t always keep up with all the exciting stuff happening in the Sailfish Community. Plus, the less of this we have to actually write ourselves the better. So please help us out by posting your Sailfish news updates to the forum as a reply to this post. We’ll collate as much of it as possible into one easily digestible post for the next update. This is your news!
Please do also join us at our community meetings on IRC, Matrix and Telegram. The next community meeting will be on the 26th February.
Remember to follow us also in Mastodon jolla (@jolla@techhub.social) - TechHub
