In my experience (Xperia 10iii with licensed SailfishX and Android App Support, and Pinephone Pro with community SailfishOS and Waydroid) Waydroid is indeed less well integrated and I’ve abandonned it.
@finaltwist did you actually read the TOS etc.?
<Sales Terms and Conditions - The Privacy Respecting European OS and AI Solution Provider
<Terms of Service - The Privacy Respecting European OS and AI Solution Provider
<Sailfish EULA - The Privacy Respecting European OS and AI Solution Provider
<Privacy Policy - The Privacy Respecting European OS and AI Solution Provider
(sorry if this was posted already)
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others have answered this sufficiently, but here’s my two cents anyway-
i used SFOS on a community supported device (XZ2c), with waydroid for android appsupport and absolutely no paid apps, for years. i liked WD better than aliendalvik (as appsupport was known at the time), though AAS is more robust now, and WD was a little less tightly integrated. i would still be on that phone if 3G tele service still existed instead of only VoLTE.
also, you can purchase a license, login to your jolla account, download the appsupport RPMs, then logout+delete the account on the phone, and AAS continues to work. i’m not sure this even violates the TOS, but i don’t see why it would hurt anyone, you can’t use the same license on multiple phones anyway.
if you wanted (though this probably violates the TOS and is pointless anyway), you could download the RPMs, copy them off the phone, reflash the phone, copy them back, and re-install AAS, and the phone would never know about your account. you can log back in for updates at your leisure. i have done this in the past, to streamline re-flashing with limited internet.
so yea, AAS is reasonably safely yours once installed. that being said, yes there are a few closed source components that jolla could, theoretically, be hiding nasty backdoors inside…but your main alternative is to pick one of two companies that gets in trouble for hiding nasty backdoors every other week.
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Have you run Waydroid on a Fairphone 4 (or has anyone else)?
I’d love to hear how the experience goes.
More than that, though, I’d love any pointers people might give me to help me get started thinking through writing a native Sailfish app that could be a wrapper for mobile web banking: could that be done generally, to give native integration with banking functionality—as that’s most commonly the Android apps that keep people from fully-native Sailfish apps.
Well we shall not advice or advertise manoevers that breaks jolla’s terms and conditions in a forum like that.
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And also totally off topic.
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Hmm, sounds like I need to re-read the TOS. Its been a few years since I bought that license. Thanks for the reminder.
Is this true? Can Jolla deny me the use of the android compatibility layer, and other features, like the app store?
My question—which might go against my TOS, in which case I’m not gonna do it—was along the lines of the original topic in this thread, as evidenced by the above quote.
i mean, it’s pretty obvious that taking the only paid+proprietary components from one licensed phone and copying it to an unpaid unlicensed phone is not gonna be permitted.
also, in my experience, the aliendalvik rpms were not enough to get it working on unsupported hardware, though it worked just fine on the same hardware (for offline re-flashing on the same licensed device! not for stealing licenses!)
the OP is used to predatory licensing, the ‘appstore’ being weaponized against them, and to having to be online to get gate-checked every time you wanna use an app. none of those things apply to sailfish at the current time. you can just pay once, download the rpms, and log out, and everything still works, minus upgrades. this means if the server goes down, our phones aren’t bricked. presumably, this desirable state of affairs exists only because they trust their users to not steal licenses… … … … …
anyway, waydroid apparently does work on FP4, try that
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I obviously asked without first thinking through the ethics of my request. So next time, in addition to RTFM (M = TOS in this case), I need to TFMR, “Think First Making Requests.”
Thanks for your clear and helpful reply!
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It may not be officially permitted, but I would consider it morally acceptable if someone who bought a Sailfish license for a supported phone transferred the files to an unsupported device, especially if they would not have bought the license in the first place.
if you make that /only/ if they would have not have bought the license /and/ do not simultaneously use the license for the other device (or if they buy a second permanently unused license), then i mostly agree with your moral stance.
but sidestepping a license agreement because your morals permit it can have other bad consequences. jolla might decide to do some of the evil things that the OP is worried about, if they feel their limited revenue is threatened and that anti-piracy actions are their only recourse. and we don’t want them to ever feel that way, so maybe don’t endorse pirating sailfish on jolla’s official forum 
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They would not have bought the license for the second device either way because there’s no way to do that for an unsupported device, so there would be no loss for Jolla in either case.
I’m not promoting pirating SFOS, but I can understand why someone would want to do copy the closed parts in some circumstances. I have zero influence over the OP’s or anyone else’s conscience and am only stating what I consider acceptable for myself.
I have Waydroid on a Volla Quintus, I have no Fairphone. But the experience should be similar, since Waydroid is kind of virtualization container. So the experience should be largely independent from the host device. Is there a specific question from your side concerning Waydroid?
Similar: Yes and no.
Indeed, all current android compatibility solutions: Jolla’s Android App Support, Valve’s Lepton, Waydroid, etc. rely on running Android (or at least AOSP, the opensource bits of Android) inside a container (inside LXC, uses the same linux kernel’s tech as the popular Docker).
…BUT!..
Running the container is the easy part. The actual difficult part is forwarding stuff into-/out of- said container: Getting the app (AAS) or the entire android environment (Waydroid) to display in a window or in fullscreen (Lepton). Getting android apps to see the GPS location. Getting audio and inputs (AAS: Keyboards, Lepton: Gamepad and other controller), etc.
On containers with pure GNU/Linux distros this is a relatively solved problem with a set of standardized approaches (Portals, X11 forwarding, etc.)
When running Android inside a container it’s an entire different can of worms, with multiple different way to solve some problems (Andbox used some special debug interface normally reserved for emulators to push the display to the outise, whereas Waydroid makes it look like a custom GPU driver, etc.)
Some solution take ages to be developped (AAS’ Bluetooth bridge), and not all candidates need to solve the same problems to begin with (there’s lot of gaming and VR specific stuff that only Lepton needs to solve, there lots of mobile phone specific stuff that Valve can entirely skip. That’s why Lepton and Waydroid aren’t sharing as much code as Proton and Wine are).
If you have a phone for which you own a Sailfish OS license (e.g.: You bought a Jolla 2026 phone which is sold with capacity to run android apps), but you somehow want that phone to never ever touch a Jolla server ever, it is both technically possible and (should be) legal (For sure in Switzerland under the “technical copy” exemption; I guess most of Europe should have similar laws?) and should be morally acceptable for you to download the RPMs you need (e.g. from a different Jolla 2026 phone), save them on a USB-C stick, plug that stick in your “never to touch a Jolla server Jolla 2026 phone”, and use zypper on the command line to install those RPMs on that phone for which you already have the right to use AAS.
You’ll be achieving the same result as downloading it from the online shop, just through a much more round about way.
(and although you avoided touching Jolla servers, now the android apps will happily leak all your pii back to their respective motherships).
There are technical incompatibilities that would prevent you installing those RPMs on a completely different phone: unlike, e.g., the Microsoft Exchange compatibility plug-in, the Android App Support software has the above mentionned bunch of special adapters to make the inside of your Android container talk with the SailfishOS (a more standard GNU/Linux distro) outside of it. And all these adapters are very dependent on the Hardware Abstraction Layer that is used to run SailfishOS on your physical hardware (e.g.: most versions of Sailfish OS use libhybris to run SailfishOS on top of drivers initially designed for Android). Just look at the compatibility list of the bluetooth bridge to get an idea (works with only a small selection of devices).
Jolla has mentionned in the past that they are planning to work on a solution that would allow people to buy licenses for Android App Support, etc. for 3rd party devices running community ports. That should solve the legal/licensing part.
…BUT!..
The pecularities of hardware abstraction layers still matter (e.g.: maybe it will still not be possible to run AAS on a linux smartphone that runs an upstream linux kernel with native drivers like the PinePhone Pro).
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As always very impressive explanation, Ivan.
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