I’m afraid I’ve given up trying to use SFOS paired to a car for either phone or audio - I rely on my iPhone 12 now and SFOS on my XA2 is really just used as a hobby phone. There are multiple other threads on the quality issue, which I’m sure you have read. Generally when people raise this issue the forum enthusiasts’ response is either “It must be your hardware device that’s at fault” or “Jolla is a small company without the necessary resources so you can’t expect anything different”. And whilst the latter may be true it is completely missing the point.
Jolla is a small company, and it may not have many resources, but then why not concentrate on doing less things really well, rather than more things and never quite getting them sorted? Plenty of small companies develop and offer niche products that are of good quality, reliable and usable. That’s a much better business model than trying to constantly deliver ‘more’ and failing.
I think there is a real risk that Jolla will leave a trail of ‘almost working’ phones in their wake with their current ‘software development driven’ business model. I shortly fully expect them to say “We’re not fixing any more bugs on the 32-bit XA2 SFOS because we’ve now moved onto 64-bit and are concentrating our resources there”. Then what happens when the next tech innovation comes along on the Xperia 10 iv or whatever? All the previous phones will be stuck in their ‘we almost got it right’ state with non-functioning bits of the OS and apps that won’t run properly any more. That’s not really going to do much for customer confidence regardless of whether they are corporate or consumer customers.
In another thread somebody said that Jolla doesn’t compete with the big boys like Apple and Google. Of course it does - that’s why we keep getting shiny new features like encryption, Sailjail, 64-bit, etc. They may not compete on market share, target customer base and so on, but they certainly compete on product features, functionality, etc. They have to otherwise they’d be pushing the functionality of a Nokia 5110 in 2021 and nobody would be interested. This is part of the problem.
However I often wonder why Jolla never concentrate on pure bug-fix releases rather than always striving for visual or functionality change in every new release - personally I don’t care if, say the people app, has pulley menus or tabs or buttons, I just want it to work. Its like they are trying to constantly impress their market with the next shiny new thing - even if its not fully developed, doesn’t work reliably or breaks a whole load of existing apps. Its a telling story that the technically competent devs on this forum are constantly providing workarounds for Jolla issues by providing scripts, or suggested edits to config files, or shell commands to restart this or that, or patches, and so on. The reality check is that this is 2021 and we’re talking about a mobile phone OS - who does (or should be expected to do) all that just to keep a mobile phone working?
This is of course a double edged sword - and I do have some sympathy for Jolla in this respect. With so many users mucking around with the internals of their OS installations Jolla never knows precisely the state of the OS software that any forum bug is reported against - and I have no doubt that some workarounds will have knock on consequences that nobody has thought of which affects, or even causes, some of these bugs. People rant against Apple for their closed ios ecosystem, but at least it guarantees that everything works properly day-in and day-out.
Anyway, all the above is one point of view. The other point of view is that Jolla doesn’t really worry or care about all this - as long as they can pay their employees, give them something interesting to do, and retain a few big corporate clients as a result they are happy to remain as a ‘hobby niche’ provider to anyone else. Although I often wonder (and nobody seems to know) why ‘proper’ Aurora customers aren’t seemingly bothered by all of these basic capability and quality issues. Perhaps there some of them on this forum with a view?
