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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why do you want to port webapps into … binary ones? It has totally no logical point.
You’ll need to spend much more time and resources to keep them up to date for different platforms. Not to mention other issues.
again people, trust me (and @attah), we know about the downsides, i use sailfish as my daily driver. There is a multitude of threads and comments about what can be improved. I don’t even need to start getting into the “dont compare SFOS to an Alphabet/Apple product” or “look at the other open source os” debate, that would be too easy (and please refrain from doing so in this thread, it’s not the goal).
If you don’t feel like recommending the OS to your friend for XYZ reason that’s okay, at least you are talking about it, that’s also a strategy.
Secondly, and very important, this is not about Jolla strategies to bring more users, this thread is about user strategies to do anything related to sharing the knowledge of the os.
That’s also a really nice strategy. Not all of us have development capacities, and those users who do, and are sharing their knowledge to build something for the others, is appreciated.
that’s really nice too, keep going !
Not sure about the different sound notification for each sim card but everything else on your list works fine on the XA2 now albeit with a bit of hacking (Nekros fix for GPS) or Android apps for HDR.
The browser is just insanely time consuming. I agree with you but the only real solution is putting up with it or running an Android browser.
I’m seeing a lack of leadership on the forums (and on social media). Once again, I have very little idea what’s going on with Jolla, other than 4.5 coming out soon.
The Newsletter is nice but we need more don’t we?
@mjun – awesome if you can get the Camera 2 API working. Camera 1 API is blamed for SF’s very poor camera perfomance in low light conditions.
I speak as a game and software developer.
I want to port webapps into “binary” (currently python looks really tempting) becuase they are mostly my apps, as the person who made them, nothing would make me happier than more people having the choice to use them.
When you make something that is done with others in mind, be it enjoyment or usability, of course you’d get some joy out of people using and enjoying things you make! – But as a developer, I personally think it’s twice as fun to learn something new. As someone who makes games primarily in C# and PWA-capable apps, I know I’d end up making more stuff as I get better in QML and the languages this OS allows you to develop in.
I think anyone who enjoys making stuff, in general, could share a similar sentiment.
As for keeping them up to date, that’s the fun bit~ QML, much like Web, can be coded once and be written for other platforms~! Your limit would the language and libraries you use.
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ok So I just talked to my colleague and mentioned this (one more time).
The first question from him was: what is that, why I didn’t hear about it? (he forgot).
The second question was: is it working fine or there are any problems? Now I could only say - well you know…
After which he said, ok get back to me once the problems will be fixed and more people will be using it.
So after a while it came to me that two things must be done. First, people need to know about it - that’s what you’re asking here. But second is more important which is. When they’ll hear about it and want to test this, there must be no problems. No problems that need patches etc. Because this is the first impression which is very important. If they will try it and they will find out that such basic thing as sms is still not working reliable, they will never come back and what’s worse, they’ll spread the word that the system is bad.
So I’m sorry but first, fix what’s broken and stop pleasing “kids with new toy every year”. Second we can get back to spreading the word.
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No no no. I didn’t install SFOS to install Android apps on it. Come on, it’s not how this supposed to be working. As you saw I have sms problems and I didn’t know these exists until other side didn’t mention this! That’s really bad and big problem!
The GPS is also a lottery. Last time I was in the mountains, after 30 mins without GPS the phone did reboot and a miracle happened. After reboot, the fix was in less than 5 seconds! And no, patch is not a solution. I mean if there’s patch and it does fix the problem, why it’s still not part of the system?
Browser is finally usable I mentioned this and every time I mention this I’m thanking Jolla for this great amount of work as this was one of the big milestones for getting SFOS a usable device.
So yes, thank you Jolla for updating the browser!
When you make something that is done with others in mind, be it enjoyment or usability, of course you’d get some joy out of people using and enjoying things you make! –
yes, so you’re trying to reach the biggest number of users. Making “binary” apps is the quite opposite cause you’re limiting yourself. For example, having an app as a webapp, you can reach every single device on earth that has a decent browser. You don’t need to fiddle with platform compilers, linkers, build systems, deploy systems etc etc. You just give the link and it works, out of the box!
While having a binary app? Well if you need efficiency then of course you’ll go into binary app but then you don’t use python or c# for this. You either pick up one of: C, C++, RUST.
Interesting fact is:
Under condition Navigation set to GPS only, Flight mode:
Time to get position fix:
Sony Xperia 10: 50 sec.-1 min.
Volla: 5 -7 sec.
My dark suspicion is that a lot of problems are associated with the Sony blob (aka ‘binaries’).
edit: I forgot to mention above, exactly the same situation is on connecting to the mobile network after switching off the flight mode.
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Yeah, a lot of the ‘issues’ mentioned here are just not a problem on the GS290/Vollaphone. The GS5 has a couple of issues but function? Everything works. Reliably. The browser even deals with web gl stuff I didn’t think it could handle. But, that’s not the point of this thread.
One thing that sort of snuck up on me, is social media behavior. Much like a certain number of SFOS releases, I kinda ‘skipped’ twitter. Now I’m using tooter quite a lot (much to the detriment of the fediverse) Obviously, I just mention SFOS stuff. And I use an SFOS tool to do so. It will help if we become more visible.
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The only way to bring more sailors to SFOS imho is quality.
Jolla should focus on one (1) of the well known bugs, fix it and immediately publish a new sub-version of SFOS, so that all users can update and immediately profit from the fix.
The waiting time for new updates with a lot of fixes that mostly all really worked fine in my experience is really boring and imho not necessary.
SFOS 4.4.0.72, 4.4.0.75, 4.4.0.79, 4.4.0.84,… every few weeks a new sub-version with more issues fixed. So the community and also ‘main stream customers’ can see any progress much better.
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