Hello, in the UK here, and I’ve been an avid iOS user since 2008. The time has come for me to move on… and Sailfish looks like a great fit. I am a very privacy conscious person. I am not very good technically but I know my way around phone settings.
I have three concerns about moving to Sailfish:
Garmin connectivity - I wear a Garmin Fenix watch, and it syncs Daily (sometimes multiple times per day) to the Garmin Connect app via Bluetooth. This is a non-negotable for me - I’d LOVE to know if this will be a similar experience on Sailfish? I am reading some reports in the forum of Bluetooth not working for this, but only for streaming/audio.
Tickets and QR codes. I’m aware that NFC payments likely won’t work - I use two local travel apps: ‘ScotRail’ and ‘McGills Buses’. Both have Android apps and both have the option to pay with card, rather than ‘apple pay’, so I’m sure I can use these - after payment is made, I get a QR code to scan to pass the ticket gate or board the bus.
Proton Apps - I am a Proton user, so my email, drive, photos, bitcoin, and calendar is accessed through my proton account. I want to check if these will work OK, and will Proton VPN integrate OK with Sailfish?
That’s my biggest concerns tbh, music streaming is the other big thing I use my phone for, so want to make sure I can access the likes of Tidal, Spotify or Deezer using Sailfish.
I guess my only other question, can these apps be downloaded via the Aurora store and/or do I need a google account to access in the first instance?
Thanks for your help, and sorry for the rookie questions
1 no this won’t work at all unfortunately
2 no nfc for payments but if you can set a card then apps will definitely work (not revolut anyway)
3 proton seems to be a little hit and miss, some reported it works, some it don’t
4 you can use music streaming apps, even some native ones, and you do not need a google account to use them (or download them)
Thank you! One more thing… what about Microsoft AUthenticator… I use it to authoenticate with my work’s organisational account, plus I’ve added a couple of other accounts (like Vivaldi, Nintendo). Will Authenticator work as normal (eg I’ll get a notification, open the app, and enter the passcode to authenticate)? Thanks
But really … do not get too excited! You will run into countless problems and the whole thing will be more than frustrating. With a very high chance of you not making the switch.
In order to be OK with sailfish you will have at most 3-5 android apps you really need, and use your phone probably 80% less than all your peers … for anything. And on public transport you use paper tickets. Or something along those lines, you will see.
Welcome. Switching to Sailfish is a change of culture. There a things better and others are not. If you support the basic Sailfish concepts you will find many gems, But don’t expected a 1:1 replacement for your old world. Big US companies was not supporting Sailfish until now (and I welcome this!).
When reading around here in this forum you will see a bunch of postings calling this or that. Please consider the internet is not fair. Only few people will post here “all went fine today with my Sailfish device as a daily driver”.
You can install the Garmin app in Saifish AppSupport, and use the PC application to sync your Garmin device with your account. Data will then be synced with your AppSupport app, and you’ll have them available on your Sailfish device.
Thanks! After some further reading, turns out my watch has wifi sync too, so in theory, BT connection isn’t needed, as long as I manually sync via wifi, which I can assign a hotkey too on the watch if I really wanted to save 1-2mins of my time lol. This is useful though - thank you!
I don’t know which phone do you have but on my xa2, everything works absolutely fine (except the well know bluetooth for android apps, for which at the moment i do not care at all)
To answer question 5, some guy over the italian community reported that the MS authenticator worked, but don’t quete me on that, not 100% sure
Microsoft Authenticator works with notifications etc. I think you need to install MicroG though for all this functionalities to work (together with AppSupport of course to run Android apps)
Most of the time Microsoft Authenticator is not needed.
You can use native SailfishOS TOTP tools to generate OTP tokens.
Unless the sites you need to use them for insist on the additional functions that MS Authenticator has. (In which case it would be smart to get rid of it as long as you can - unless you want Microsoft to control all your authentication use cases with their propriertary extensions.)
Another point about watches: there’s a nice community app called Amazfish that supports some smartwatches, but currently the Garmin’s arent among them.
Regarding Bluetooth (and NFC): it’s NOT directly supported in Android App support – this container cannot “see” you phone Bluetooth chip because Linux and Android use completely different software stacks (BlueZ vs whatever Google is calling their nowadays).
So: no bluetooth-based payments (nor NFC), no app that directly talk to Bluetooth device (you can only use Wifi updates with your smartwatch, you can’t have an android app directly talk to the watch; you can’t update the firmware of your bluetooth speakers, etc.)
What does work is devices handled on the SailfishOS side and then exposed as standard peripherals to Android. You can pair bluetooth speakers on SFOS and they’ll show up as a standard “audio out” in Android apps, you can pair a bluetooth foldable keyboard and it will show as just another input to Android Apps.
Regarding payment: although radio-based (NFC, Bluetooth) payment won’t work for the reason stated above, QR-code based payment can work as SailfishOS and Android apps can share the camera (e.g. I use Twint, our local Swiss member of the EMPSA) and you can pay from within apps that allow associating credit cards and other payment options with your account (e.g.: our Swiss national rail company, Valve’s Steam), and if you install Google’s original Play Services (as opposed to microG opensource re-implementation - what I’ve used most of the time) you can also do in-game purchase with the official Google system in all its 30%-tax glory (I’ve successfully paid in-app in a couple of games in the past. But most of the time I have microG installed and running so I can’t vouch).
Regarding banking in general: the situation is a hit or miss. Some app just work (my Twint payment client, one of my bank’s login and ebanking), other refuse because the phone doesn’t pass some arbitrary security test à la SafetyNet (the second bank’s login and e-banking apps absolutely refuse to boot, complaining the the phone has an unlocked bootloader)
Regarding authentication:
SailOTP works most of the time for me, including for my employers’ Microsoft 365 accounts (the exception for me is Steam: Steam Guard uses a different more complex log-in protocol. Which could be supported natively on SailfishOS but I run instead the Android SteamApp)
I switched from an iphone 3Gs to Jolla I. Long time ago. Was charmed by Sailfish from the start but struggled a lot with it, so when Jolla changed to Sony I bought an ipadmini cellular. That I still use as satnav without sim. In the meantime Sailfish improved so much on my Xperia Xa2plus that I use it every day. Fortunately Dutch devs have made nice local apps. Yet I still need a second device. Bank app works, but not Threema and not MagicEarth. The device is getting old, cardslot broken and hardly any storage left. Sailfish is elegant and intuitive, but you will miss features. However you are more free than with Apple’s control.
Not sure if it is still working, but a few years ago I could move Steam OTP to Bitwarden via this 3rd party tool, and it still works nicely for me:
The extracted secrets should work with other authenticators besides BW, but I haven’t tested with anything besides BW.
I dug up the instructions from my notes on how to use it:
"1. Follow the steps linked here Steam Desktop Authenticator. Do not encrypt/add a password (you’re going to delete this after setting it up with Bitwarden, anyway)
2. Look in the maFiles subdirectory where the SDA is installed. One of the files will be named [your_steamID].maFile. Open it.
3. One of the JSON variables will look like: "uri":"otpauth://totp/Steam:your-username?secret=ABCDEFGHIJKLMN1234OPQRSTUVWXYZ4321&issuer=Steam"
4. You want your TOTP entry in Bitwarden to look like: steam://ABCDEFGHIJKLMN1234OPQRSTUVWXYZ4321
5. Get your SteamGuard recovery codes and store them in the notes associated with your Steam login in Bitwarden.
You can confirm it’s working by comparing the value being produced by the desktop authenticator vs Bitwarden."
