Sailfish X: Sailing forward? A thread about the future of official Jolla ports on Sony Xperia mid-range phones

General
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Hi Sailors!

Just wanted to open this thread since i am a big fan of the Sailfish X program. Jolla’s sale of official ports on mid-range Xperias have many rock hard values.

Here are my own small subjective list:

--Excellent hardware for the price (top notch Oled screens, very sturdy Gorilla Victus Glass, ip68 waterproof device, trustable battery life along the years).

--Tiny form factor (so far, of course Sony may change some day its design language who knows).

--Still hardware i guess: real nice camera and speakers (my opinion).

For exemple I am a lot outdoors in very demanding conditions. My Xperias fell down countless times in rivers, lakes, on hard rocks, in the snow…totally survived all, and can take great pictures/videos by -40 degrees Celcius without complaining.

My point here is that there is I think a market for people who want an official Xperia port (and pay Jolla for the licences as we are used to), alongside people who are happy with buying the great Jolla Phone.

I underline ‘official’ port, since i know there can be in the future community ports, but for someone like me its too unreliable (developper bus factor, and so on), having a company that commits to many years of updates and reliable coding is a must for me, with such a sensitive object as a phone (of course i respect other opinions on that, i’m not getting into that topic here).

Long story short, i really hope and cross fingers for the continuation of Sailfish X, alongside other @jolla ventures.

What would it take? Shall we have a Sailfish X SIG (Special Interest Group) mixing jolla employees and community enthousiasts, that would help Jolla to port/debug Xperias, as SIG KDE helped Fedora having KDE officially onbord with quite some success?

I wonder if our motivation can help Jolla to keep Sailing the X ports :blush::smiling_face_with_sunglasses:.

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I understand your point but I would like to share my pov as well.

The Xperia 10 line is full of issues.
Odd form factor (except the new one) that is very difficult to type on and painful in IM apps, it’s very hard to find one a year after release, the prices have gone up but not the specs, the adaptions are bad and there’s no love from Sony for the open devices program.
Plus I think Sony now switched to Chinese ODMs for that line but maybe im wrong about this one.

So yes I would like to see more budget devices as well on “sfosX” program, but I would highly prefer fairphones, Motorola, nothing, just to name a few.

Not our decision ultimately of course, but I think the success of J2, the issues with 10 III, and the adaptation problems with 10 IV/V combined probably show that there’s no future with this line anymore.
And it’s justified from my perspective.

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I can understand that thoughts too, and somehow I think more phones would be better to give some choices to the potential users. Up to now I have mixed feelings when I compare the new Jolla with the 10 III - I hate the notch and miss the 3.5 headphone jack. But the success of the pre orders also show that there’s interest in the new phone. Did Jolla sell 15.000 Sailfish X licenses a year (or better nine month? I don’t think so.

If Jolla kills the bugs the new Jolla Phone has the potential of beeing a real reference phone for SFOS. But the actual software still needs polishing. But if they manage to do that there’s a big chance for others to jump on the SFOS train, just like Volla already wants (let’s say licensed official port including AAS).

With the community ports in work there would be the third option for community ports and hopefully a licensed AAS.

But steps 2 and 3 heavily relay on the success of the phone, which is also somehow a proof of concept for the market.

The Future of Sony phones is still unclear to me, they had problems with the 5 I/5 IV and also reduced the back cameras for the Xperia 10 range. The also change the back design, screen sizes… I personally won’t bet on a officisl SFOS future for Sony phones.

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The fingerprint reader on the 10 iii is very handy.
I don’t feel like entering a long PIN every time to unlock the phone.
I gather that the jollaphone doesn’t have any biometric.

I’m very happy that phones have started to be assembled in Finland, and running SFOS no-less, but to make a case for moving away from the 10 iii, Jolla need to up the game of their own handsets still, I think.

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The Jolla Phone has an excellent working Fingerprint sensor… Works much better and faster than on 10 III.

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So I see now.
I could’ve sworn I saw someone on here say that it hadn’t been included so that nobody could force you to unlock it etc. which I didn’t fully understand because you could just turn the feature off if that was the concern.

Can you say how the camera on the Jollaphone compares to the 10 iii?

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I guess the wrong information about fingerprint sensor existence is tied to the fact that it doesn’t work for AAS.

Camera definitely needs software polishing. Okay for me, to my mind better then on 10 III, but heavily depending on light, motive and other circumstances. But there are other opinions too if you search the forum.

Lumia 950, iPhone Xr, Xperia 5 II and 5 IV as well as Android 10 III are still better. But as said - it’s the software, not the hardware.

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The camera is ok, quick, nice dynamic range and sensible in low light, compared to the XA2 (sorry, no 10iii here), but quickly uses long exposure times.

Otoh, it has a blue-cyan tint and strange blurs in the background.
It also abandons to reproduce details in some structures and loses colors nuances.

Room for improvement.
But good potential and ok for everyday use, would I say.

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I wonder whether Open Camera running in AppSupport would help to up the camera’s game a bit.
I find that useful on the xperia.

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Standard SFOS camera has some strange behavior with resolution. I added a question on this to tommorows community meeting.

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Just my 2 cents:

I would love to see Jolla spin off in the same way eg. Redhat and Fedora exist. The “official” / “commercial” version (eg. Redhat / Sailfish X) and the bleeding edge FOSS “community” version (eg. Fedora / Sailfish “core”) upstream of that.

In that way, Sailfish as a whole would benefit from the upstream community efforts (ie. no longer dependent on Jolla’s tiny team finding the time and resources for badly needed improvements to the core OS), but for those of you who still want some “company that commits to many years of updates and reliable coding”, there is the downstream version that is more tightly controlled. And their commercial features (eg. AAS, Exchange Activesync, etc.) can still be closed-source and locked to this downstream project.

This would benefit both parties in that SFOS would be able to improve and grow faster as the community worked on the upstream OS, and Jolla themselves would be able to dedicate more time to really making good ports, be it for their own hardware or others.

That said, I personally will never understand the dislike for a good community port. If I had the money, I’d buy a Nagara or a Miami device over a J2 in a heartbeat, the hardware support is just so much more refined when someone is willing and able to put the effort in, and sadly at the minute Jolla do not have the resources to do that.

OBS solves this problem. There is nothing malicious in community ports built on OBS., and as for “keep updating it” - I would argue we are doing a better job than Jolla in that regard, and if someone ever stopped maintaining a community port, there is nothing stopping someone else from picking it up again and continuing. I think you are a vocal minority when it comes to disliking community ports.

So for now, I would argue Jolla should drop Sailfish X. They don’t have the manpower, and as uninterested in their hardware as I am, it is more important that the J2 succeeds and the core OS continues to improve.Otherwise we’ll never draw in more users / developers.

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Hard disagree.

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I still have Xperia 10 VI which was my earlier phone in use. Sailfish seems not yet available for it. Maybe I might flash it if official support becomes available.

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Don’t shelve it just yet. Maybe an unofficial port based on Lineage will surface over time.

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Jolla’s sale of official ports

Let’s have a brief look what’s going on with ports lately:

from that standpoint I’d say atm. the situation is not bad - but i’d say that is because the Sailfish X program has been running for quite a while and the community could profit from Jolla’s efforts.

while looking at the latest additions to sonyxperiadev (Sony – Developer World for Xperia) · GitHub (AOSP) and younger Xperias to LineageOS the layout for the future is not so bad (not forgetting that hardware-wise the future seemed unclear - Report says Sony will lean on outside help to produce its Xperia line | Android Central concluded 2025 “Some have questioned the future of the Xperia’s quality, but only time will tell.”).

As you were asking for offical ports:
from Jolla themselves I’m afaraid that will have to wait longer, now with the release of the youngest Jolla Phone.

but I very much support your claims!
IMHO continuing Sailfish X program would be profitable both for users and Jolla’s ecosystem.
I’d also appreciate if Jolla would offering Android AppSupport for more plattforms (like the above mentioned but not limited to that ports - for the one’s not so happy with Sony there are good one’s around from different Hardware vendors so why not grant licenses to all).

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I like the Sony phones, but:

  • The Xperias were great when Jolla did not have an offer
  • Jolla now has J2 and C2, addressing two levels of budgets
  • I assume Jolla makes more margin on each phone sale than on a Sailfish X licence
  • less effort/headaches/cost for Jolla to to update the J2 themselves (to the next Dimensity SoC), than following Sony updates with all the problems they bring.

Therefore I expect the Xperias to lose priority for Jolla in the coming times.

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Sony should just “get their sh*t together” and offer SFOS on dual boot or even exclusively with SFOS boom :wink:

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Sony doesn’t even care about their phone business for a decade now.
They make money from everywhere else so the 2 phones they have are just presence in the market that doesn’t cost them anything in r&d because they don’t innovate or care to do so.
And if anything they’re switching to ODMs for their devices so there’s nothing to expect from them.

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