[Strategies] Bringing more sailors to SFOS

How does that differ from any non-Russian business? Minimizing costs and mazimizing profits is the first lesson in Business 101 in for-profit companies. Charities, NGOs and government-sponsored business are the only ones that can afford to veer away from that recipe, all other companies sooner or later have to focus on maximizing profits.

What Jolla lacks is vision and a good strategy to get there, who is currently footing their bill is not as important…

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As with everything it can be done too extremely - where the compromises in other areas become too great (while still hard to quantify in such simple terms as profit). Maybe it’s an EU thing or a Nordic thing to keep other values in mind too. There are certainly elements of American-style <insert adjective here> capitalism in Russia and many other countries for that matter.

But with that said, i can’t remember having seen anything like a significant shift in that direction. From an outside view certainly looks like Jolla is respected and valued by OMP.

But is this thread not getting off track now? I for one is curious to see how @PeHek finds Sailfish after having used it for a while - and then tying it back to how we can attract more users.

@PeHek : You’re really new here! So let me say to you, that I’m abt. 2 and a half year with SFOS, have seen all updates since 3.2 and EVERY update brought some improvements, bug fixes and better or more functions. If you ‘stay tuned’, you will see.

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Just tested on the Xperia 10ii. Seems to work :slight_smile: Though haven’t tested it ‘for real’. Ie. with beer.

Sounds like a good reason to grab one. For science. :beer: :beer:

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It was nice to see the Wiki being worked on. I don’t think we ever created a group to liaise with some kind of Community Manager. Did we get more feedback from Jolla?

Somebody was frustrated about Community Meetings and got a response from a couple of developers here. It’s off-topic in that thread and I’m still not qualified to comment myself.

Being a relative newcomer to Sailfish, still having an outsider perspective, it’s clear that Purism actually has a plan, and they’re willing to reach their goals by taking small but well-calculated steps. Unlike Jolla which can be compared to a blade of grass in the wind. They had a headstart, they have a product but they can’t seem to find their way and the way they communicate and operate in general lacks passion. Librem is not good enough UI-wise yet, but it’s all but certain that they will get that right eventually. I think with that kind of mood there isn’t any future for Sailfish OS, it’s simply a good (enough) temporary solution for having a phone free from surveillance until Librem catches up.

It’s also inevitable that we’ll see a change soon in how people treat their devices. It’s all a wild west right now where big companies are free to manipulate your life however they see fit. Most people will of course never care, being accustomed to oppression, but a dissatisfaction is growing amogst the more conscious and older population. Accessible open source and strictly not-for-profit approach to your personal data and devices is the way of the future. In that case we can’t have it half-way like Sailfish currently is.

Can you buy a Librem 5? I am waiting since more than 1 year and they always postpone the shipment.

An small strategie move could be: criate a new page on this Forum, with all tricks and tips about SFOS and Android - how to avoid it, how to safety use it, how to have plenty google store, etc. I think that is a interesting question to all people that came to SFOS

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I for one am tired of old threads about leaving Sailfish… at the top of the forums.

So bump

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well I’m not surprised.
@rafaelfrigo SFOS is not mature enough.
The progress that has been made is great. Tbh from my point of view, the biggest two missing points were browser engine and encryption which is very very bad but hey, UBPorts doesn’t even have that!
Yet there’s still a lot to do. And I think one of the biggest problems that Jolla is also facing is QT which holds them on the older version.

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hi lolek, indeed there will always be things to improve somewhere, but the goal of this thread was about how do you try to make SFOS more “famous/attractive” ? Do you have any strategy ?

The strategy should be:

  • make the basic functionalities that make a mobile phone rock solid (taking calls, sms, mms etc.)
  • make the basic functionalities that make a smart phone rock solid (for example web browser that is capable of handling PWA apps with fully featured serviceworker - this will greatly reduce app gap between SFOS and Android/iOS)
  • make camera decent - meaning - ‘on par’ with similar midrange phones: properly handle HDR and night mode + at least portrat mode and panorama mode. I guess a good start would be to port OpenCamera to SFOS as it handles all of these things and it relies mostly on C++ libraries anyways

When the aforementioned 3 bullets above are met we can start considering SFOS a viable alternative to the Android/iOS and since the app ecosystem is lacking when compared to that of Android/iOS jolla should focus on privacy oriented customers (corporate and such)

Additionally, stock apps that are bundled with SFOS should become open source - I might be mistaken here but for the life of me I can’t find stock camera app anywhere on github (!)

As a nice extra, Jolla could reach out to most active developers and offer them some kind of logistical support to keep the ecosystem alive and kicking. For example SFOS doesn’t have it’s “official” map/navigation app but PureMaps fills that hole nicely.

Just my 2 cents

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hey mjun, those are nice suggestions, but the topic is more related on the end user point of view, what strategies is the user (us) doing to bring more sailors (see the first post where I give my personal example)

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I know, but currently the only thing we can do is to show someone how SFOS looks like and hope they don’t mind the issues.

When you don’t have a rock solid OS it’s really hard to convince someone to buy:
1.) really expensive midrange phone
2.) to unlock the bootloader and thus lose warranty
3.) install OS that will most likely result in experience worse than stock Android OS

these are just facts of life and to be honest - SFOS is currenty an “enthusiast” phone. Geeks, developers and people that like tech will probably try out SFOS, maybe even use it as a daily phone but what I currently see the most likely scenario is that the most users will use SFOS as a second phone (either for work or to play with).

What WE, the community/users can do is to improve SFOS until it really becomes rock solid platform thus making it easier to promote it to “average Joe” type of user.

This might sound harsh but I’m sharing my experience as someone that really relies on stable basic smartphone functionalities - sms, mailing, messaging, navigating and browsing the web - all of which don’t really work that smoothly and reliably. These are my experiences so far (since 2019. until now):

  • sms messages not being sent
  • gps unable to acquire location fix for 30 minutes (or until restart)
  • phone calls randomly dropping or appearing to have mobile phone turned off to other callers
  • browser with weird css rendering making some websites unusable (ebay, or mostly submitting contact forms with recaptcha)

I’m currently planning to see if I could implement Camera2 API for SFOS to at least fix one of the major 10 III bugs and make it somewhat useful - at least in the camera department

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the problem is I personally would recommend Sailfish to anyone because I can’t just not say about problems it has. I’m already spreading the word to my friends. Most of them are technical but they usually ask about downsides so the end result is - nope. I’m the most hardcore user with very low phone expectations and even for me SFOS is still not mature enough.

See, if the phone lacks basic things these days like:

  • proper encryption
  • different sound notification for at least different sim card
  • reliable GPS
  • reliable mobile data
  • camera with HDR
  • BT that need terminal to pair with other device
    then it’s hard to persuade them to even try when they will have to give up a working phone.

can you elaborate on this. Is this random or something else? Last time two peoples told me they didn’t receive my sms even that SFOS shown that the message has been sent!

Can you please not make this into another whining thread?

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While I’m not an app developer yet, at least not for Sailfish, I am very interested in starting to develop for Sailfish and Ubuntu Touch, particularly, I want to port my existing (web) apps over.

But I’ve been looking into libraries to make other apps that I otherwise use android versions of (ie DroidSound, Jopplin, Maki (multi-social media browser), among others)

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This used to be the case for me when I used XA2 as my daily driver phone back in 2019/2020. That made me switch back to android and if I remember correctly this has been fixed in one of the updates.

I’m currently using both of my SFOS phones (XA2 and 10 III) mainly as hobby/development phones so I can’t really say if SMS issues still happen or not (check out the bug reports).

@attah we are just stating the facts and experiences we had both personally and when talking to other people (trying to bringing them over to SFOS) - it is not my intention to “whine” - we need to be able to discuss things openly and look at problem from multiple perspectives.

I think the best thing we can do is to improve the platform, once it matures enough people will come. It’s really as simple as that.

I just bought another XA2 (plus) for the sole purpose of having working stock sony camera at hand in order to try to bring SFOS camera experience closer to stock XA2 camera experience (which in turn will benefit other phones).

I think at this point it is not a matter of bringing more people over to SFOS but making existing SFOS users not switch back to android/iOS.

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