I totally agree. Jolla has to do his job first. My requirements are not exorbitantly high and it is sad to have to replace core functions with Android apps. SFOS degrades itself to a simple program starter for Droid.
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I remember the times when I had Jolla 1 and Jolla C. The price was not actual at all. I loved the UI from the first time. Then I waited for each update and always enjoyed the new phone. Over time, the joy faded due to the lack of apps and phone capabilities that were relevant to me. I can’t recommend a phone to a company or friends that won’t meet my daily expectations.
I use every day: calling, sms, browsing, mail, calendar, camera, cloud storage, navigation, messenger, banking app, suunto app.
Less commonly used: Neste fuel app, car / bike loading and parking, YouTube, discord.
I had to give up the phone because most of the android apps were not compatible with the outdated Alien dalvik.
My friends and I are ordinary users who need a phone that just works without a lot of settings and adjustments.
When SailfishOS will have:
a clear roadmap, a good camera, will support most of the apps I use, then I will be able to retry and possibly recommend the phone to friends.
Until then, I wish everyone a good wind 
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The major drawback for me is the poor camera support of Sailfish.
I can handle everything else with workarounds, AlienDalvik or Apple-Fanboyish sugercoating.
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I make no judgement on what Jolla does or does not want - I have no inside knowledge, only what is in the public domain. At the last community meeting they did say that their focus was business-to-business (Rostelcom I imagine) and not consumer use of Sailfish. I cannot remember the exact words but it was effectively in a nutshell that they saw the Sailfish community as a useful testing ground and source of development for them. If they do not see wider consumer use of Sailfish as a strategy at this stage then it would make no sense for them to invest money by making, for example, it easier for consumers to access Sailfish pre-installed on somebody else’s phone.
My statement was therefore just my personal opinion that if they wanted to attract wider consumer usage of Sailfish then consumer access to ‘Sailfish phones’ (however you define this - SF pre-installed on Sony phones, Fairphone, their own hardware or whatever) is an essential prerequisite.
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Something like the fairphone wont cut it. Its a product designed with a certain goal in mind and that is different than making a really good phone.
I’d much rather see the do an official colaboration with Sony. Something iPhone 12 mini/smaller than xz2c sized with the industrial design of sony (NO NOTCHES) and let the Sony camera quality. And port their “pro” cinema and photo apps to it. I’d pay more than iphone money for something like that.
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And building a critical mass of users (whether they be corporate or consumer) is again an essential requirement before professional app developers will even consider developing or porting their apps to Sailfish. If none of the above then Sailfish will remain a hobby OS for tech savvy community users - and that may be fine and perhaps what Jolla wants at this stage … so perhaps the strategy for bringing more Sailors to SFOS is to think small and try to grow the hobby tech community and forget about SFOS ever being a viable consumer alternative to IOS and Android.
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I suppose that the possible approaches are not mutually excluding each other. Starting the OS for tech savvy community users may well lead to further improvements that might render SFOS suitable for an average user one day. The problem I see is that the target moves fast (I mean changing standards for almost everything including browser engines, camera image processing, telephony standards, security bugs, ever changing hardware etc …) so that catching up is quite a challenge.
From my personal point of view SFOS is not that far off. Installing SFOS on a new phone may be the biggest problem for new users.
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I think it is extremely unlikely to get an official collaboration with Sony, and if we get one that will be similar to Tizen and Samsung. Therefore an official collaboration with Fairphone on paper imo is more likely. Organisations and corporations would then consider buying a ready for use product that suits their needs.
I know many of us would prefer a smaller size devices too, but that’s something different, maybe Fairphone can introduce a compact version too. At the moment even “officially” Xperia supported models functionality is highly dependant on AOSP without many options
PS the instead of Fairphone could be another manufacturer, I just do not know other names right now.
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Agreed, possible approaches are not mutually exclusive, and you may be right about SFOS being suitable for average consumer use one day. They need a paradigm change to move the game onwards in the current market for this to happen though. Nokia was king of mobile phones once with their feature phones, but they didn’t see the paradigm change of smartphones coming - so Apple came from nowhere and established themselves as the King of the Smarphone market in a very short time. Google did the same - their paradigm change was to allow Android to be (mainly) open source which could be freely used by other phone manufacturers whilst Apple restricted IOS only to their own limited range of hardware. Kodak was the King of film cameras for decades, but where are they now? - a paradigm shift to digital cameras trashed their business model almost overnight. The question is, what is the next paradigm shift in the mobile phone market and can Jolla be the one to get their first and capitalise on it?
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That we have to unlock a Sony and then to flash Sailfish on it is not something that you can expect from the majority op people.This will never convince non-tech sVvy people. I am the only one in my family and amoung the people I know who did this. The first time James Noori did it for me. The second time I did it with some advise. The third time I did it myself entirely.But it is a burden. Therefore a flashing service would be fine. Against payment of course. This is also how Gael Duval does it with his /e/.
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Intressting view.
From my perspective, Nokia’s Symbian S60 phones were more of a smartphone (i.e. universal programmable tool with lots of apps) than the iPhone. They just weren’t that sleek and easy to handle. Apple convinced the people with LESS features but an easier access to those limited features.
Kodak invented the digital camera (Inventor: Steve Sasson) but failed to produce affordable digital cameras for consumers. So they did not miss the technology (to the contrary, they created it) but they missed the market. Again, Kodak’s competitors provided products of lower quality but these products were cheaper and easier to use (like decades ago the Kodak box compared to other, more sophisticated cameras)
And Jolla originally claimed that SFOS would become the third relevant mobile OS for everyone. Jolla 1 was for consumers and had nice features such as the TOH that could have attracted people if SFOS 1 had been more mature.
I am not sure what conclosions can be drawn from these reflections.
However, I am glad that Jolla found a B2B market niche and hope for a comeback one day
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Indeed. I wonder if, at the time Kodak realised the significance (i.e. a paradigm change) of what they’d invented. Certainly, as you say, they failed to capitalise on their invention - as did Nokia with their early ‘Smart Feature Phones’. I can contrast this with Philips when they invented the compact audio cassette. Their masterstroke was to licence it free to other manufactures, so it became widely used and effectively shut out the competing technologies (remind you of Google with Android?).
I guess the only conclusion that can be drawn is the SFOS does not yet have a knockout USP which would result in a paradigm change in the consumer market - its just a small fish in a very big sea dominated by two sharks and doesn’t really do anything significantly better or significantly different yet to change the balance of power in that sea.
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Another hurdle after flashing the phone for normal users is the message “We cannot trust your device, because of the unlocked bootloader”.
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Fixed it for you 
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it’s aactually worse, unlocking the bootloader is irreversible drm keys are deleted which many apps rely on at least in android
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Yessss ;-), with a view to SFOS that may be true, but for an inexperienced user it is rather irritating.
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Sorry, my exerience is limited. I bought a Jolla phone. Ok, that was easy. It died. Some years later… I purchased a Volla phone which is open and was flashed with ubports (I don’t need ubports, but wanted to test it). It was ‘easy’. noob easy. Installing on a Fairphone is also ‘easy’. One click easy. But, those phones are ‘not supported’. As I get the chance I’ll try other phones. But, so far, the experience with FP2 and Volla is enough to convince me to do some application dev.
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What is the recent situation with INOI phones?
Here: https://sailfishmods.de/inoi-r7-spezifikation/
is a picture of such a phone, but on the INOI homepage
https://inoi.com/
no word about SFOS/Aurora.
Does anybody know more about INOI?
Didn’t they sell ‘preinstalled’ Aurora phones 1 or 2 years ago? But I can’t find anymore offer no more now.
The ‘insert acronym here’ is usability. One handed use of SFOS is a pleasure. The integration of apps that conform to the ambience that I choose is a pleasure. The guidelines for design are clear and inspired.
Android and IOs are overwhelmed by garbage design. Both graphic and industrial. In the end, developers will come as devices become available. it is only recently that a larger number of efforts (since Canonical ducked out) are coming online.
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I completely agree with you SFOS is a pleasure to use and I too love the UI (like Meego went before) … but, and its a big one, all the swiping, ambiences and usability in the world are worth nothing unless there are sufficient range of mature and reliable apps to swipe and use through the UI to cover at least the basic average consumer needs in a phone. I mean no average consumer is going to buy a phone just to spend all day marvelling at the brilliant UI and nothing else.
I still come back to my much earlier point that maybe Jolla ought to put UI development, beautification, design consistency, etc on the shelf for six months and concentrate their efforts on a point release to fix the majority of basic flaws in the core apps. Lets forget about whether the settings app has tabs or lists, whether we have pulley menus or buttons in the email app, etc and just get the email app sychronizing reliably with attachments you can actually open, fix the white screen and dialog focus issues in the web browser (maybe even update the Gecko to one newer than 2018), fix the robotic sound in Android messaging apps, get XMPP to work as it should, sort the poor camera quality, get the people app favourites function working, fix the Facebook account integration issue, etc, etc, etc. Then you’d have a basic product which was actually consumer usable (if not yet consumer available or installable). I can’t help thinking that approach would go along way to enhancing Jolla’s reputation as a credible product provider.
I also can’t help wondering why there isn’t the same type of demand from Jolla’s Russian paymasters to fix these problems. Do Aurora folk use none of these apps then?
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