Sailfish Community News, May 14, 2026 - Ascension Day

[Jolla]

Sailfish OS update from Jolla

Fortnight newsletter and Ascension Day! @vige authored once again Harbour news and @dcaliste Repository roundup. Big hand for both authors. Give a look what’s happening in Harbour and Sailfish OS repositories. Harbour queue is getting longer which is in away good news. Keep Calm and Hack On.

TOH update

The Other Half (TOH) is a swappable back cover but it is not just a back cover — it transforms your Jolla Phone. As we speak, we are preparing an update regarding TOH technical specification. The plan is to start by publishing information about what kind and where the connector is on the device. Later, more about how the TOH works etc. Once published we can all start tinkering what kind of innovation we, as Sailfish Community, can do together and please share your input. The TOH technical specification could still be subject to minor changes (no promises).

The Other Half Returns — Community Innovation Program

Hi there, As we approach selling total 5,000 units (), we’re thrilled to announce Batch #3: The Other Half is coming back if we reach 10,000. Just like we defined the next gen Jolla Phone together with the community, we want to design the new The Other Half together with you. We’ll share what’s technically possible, you’ll vote on what to build, and together we’ll create something unique. What is The Other Half? The Other Half (TOH) is a swappable back cover that does more than protect …

Sailfish OS 5.1

In preparation to publish the next major Sailfish OS release, 5.1, to early access users, we have published the repositories and added them to the community OBS. This means that the developers who want to test things on device can update their devices from command line, you know how to do it, if you don’t, then this is not for you

Sailfish OS 5.1 developer early access

In preparation to publish the next major Sailfish OS release, 5.1, to early access users, we have published the repositories and added them to the community OBS. This is done so that the software in Chum and other projects in OBS can be rebuilt against the new release, and any build issues fixed before the release is published to the wider early access user base. Many of the build tools and lower level libraries have received version updates of varying degrees, so incompatibilities and other is…

If you are not developer and/or do not need community OBS for testing packages against Sailfish OS 5.1, please do not update yet.

We’ll inform you again when there is something to update. Stay tuned .

Harbour news

The Harbour queue is a bit over one month now.

Watchlist

Watchlist, an app for tracking stocks, was updated to version 0.13.10. The changes from version 0.13.8 are:

• fixed currency sign handling for the ING backend
• fixed broken ING backend
• updated user agent string
• added liberapay donation link
• cleanup of configuration files

Dee

Dee is a native client for Lemmy. It allows you to browse your subscribed communities and read the posts along with their comments. You can also reply to posts or comments and upvote/downvote posts. Dee supports two-factor authentication. Someone might also be interested in the fact that Dee is written in Rust.

Spliit

Spliit, the expense sharing and tracking app, was updated to version 0.9.1. The new version has several new features: creating a new group, listing balances, listing activities and listing/updating group settings.

地铁查询Metro Routes

The metro route app received updated data: Guangzhou and Foshan data to 20260213, and Shenzhen data to 20251228. Also the UI received optimizations.

Repository roundup

Main interface

• sailfish-utilities, the setting page to restart failing services, abranson proposed to expand the Bluetooth restart action to AppSupport also (preparing for a Bluetooth bridge between Sailfish and AppSupport).

• sailfish-weather, the application providing weather forecast information, pvuorela fixed a label overlapping with the forecast icon.

Network, communication and telephony stack

• nemo-qml-plugin-email, QML bindings for emails, after the introduction of server setting detection, pvuorela fixed incoming data received as application/xml instead of text/xml.

• connman, the connection manager, Laakkonenjussi added a new property to tell if the network is supported on the device or not, like the wifi having signal but the device lacking WPA3 capabilities for connection.

• libconnman-qt, QML bindings for the connection manager, Laakkonenjussi exposed the new property telling if a network is supported.

• ofono, the telephony library, mariogrip found and fixed a use after-free, avoiding a crash with glic 2.40.

Browsing the web

• gecko-dev, Mozilla’s Gecko web rendering engine, mal backported patches due to glibc being updated.

Contacts

• qtcontacts-sqlite, SQLite-based plugin for QtPIM contacts, based on initial work from jbicha, pvuorela droped case sensitive search.

Multimedia

• nemo-qtmultimedia-plugins, a plugin adding GStreamer as a QML video backend, abranson delayed texture state changes until the next frame. Indeed, a change in resolution in an adaptive stream may arrive before the new frame. Before the patch, the change was applied on the current frame, showing a deformed version of the video during the transition.

• qtmultimedia, Qt library to handle multimedia, abranson moved from playbin2 to playbin3 from GStreamer to enable adaptive streaming support. He also avoided initialising the cameras when enumerating them.

• gst-droid, plugin for GStreamer allowing to use hardware accelerated codecs, abranson fixed various issues that he noticed when implementing the adaptive streaming support. He also optimised the cold-start speed of the camera class by delaying the codec query.

• droidmedia, Android media wrapper library, abranson added a new capability to use the torch without setting-up a full camera.

Low level libraries

• mce, mode control entity, mal adjusted how an active charger is reported. Indeed MediaTek devices report different kind of chargers with non zero numbers, while previously, only a value of 1 was accepted as an active charger.

• python-mako, a template library in Python, mal updated it to 1.3.12.

• libpng, the library to read Portable Network Graphic formats, mal updated it to 1.6.58.

• openjpeg, an open-source JPEG 2000 codec, mal updated the upstream repository to the latest master branch.

Developer’s corner

• curl, the command-line tool to access the web, mal updated it to 8.20.0.

• sdk-harbour-rpmvalidator, the harbour validation scripts, martyone updated the allowed libraries since glibc has been upgraded to 2.41.

• sdk-setup, part of the Sailfish SDK, martyone fixed some compatibility issues with busybox not supporting redirection from strings with <<<.

Please feed us your news

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. Next community meeting will be on the May 21.

Community meeting on 21st May 2026

Please note new time slot Schedule: Thursday 2026-05-21T16:00:00Z (UTC) Sailfish OS Community Calendar (ICS format) Even if you do not participate, topics tend to generate discussion. I want to see discussion happening. Thus, I’m proposing that we’d use 10mins as minimum topic duration. Maximum 6 topics a week. We’ll continue with the extended 90 mins meeting duration. Jolla to check action points from the previous meeting. We agreed today that we’ll start to follow up ac…

[hanswf]

@Jolla

The Harbour queue is a bit over one month now.

Reminds me to feed this fancy queue too..

[poetaster]

I’m now up to pushing 3 new versions before one gets published

[hanswf]

Go on! This queue must be well nourished!

[CLMA31]

Amazing to get the community news even on holiday! And kudos to Jolla for doing developer early access, please make that continues thing if it isn’t <3

[dronk]

Nice

Also I don’t know if a none binding message that a developer is thinking about bringing their app to Sailfish OS may be considered as a news, but eYou and Monnett are

See this post (it’s mine) and the Monnett reply

murdurn (@murdurn@mastodon.social)

[rubdos]

@Jolla

Someone might also be interested in the fact that Dee is written in Rust.

Congrats @ilpianista for beating us to Harbour!
Dee is great, by the way