Very buggy OS on Xperia 10 II

General
#24

A whole company (or at least productive part of one) taking a break at once while they have paying customers that may depend on their products?

Damn right they should never have taken a break, what sort of a question is that? Individuals should, of course, take a break but the work must continue while some of the workforce are on a break, that’s like a ‘Organizing a company, 101’ level stuff.

Stability. It has taken a dive with every new version while chasing elusive new features to have an impression of being a relevant competitor to Google or Apple. Sailfish on Jolla 1 was more-or-less stable; sure, there were quirks but never to a point that I couldn’t consider it my daily driver (short of app support), Sailfish on Jolla C was still stable but the hardware couldn’t cope with ‘new features’. Sailfish X on the first Xperia was buggy but still usable (and the most annoying quirks got ironed out over time)…

Sailfish X on Xperia 10 II is just an annoyance fest, phantom battery draining, screen flickering, losing network connection randomly, Bluetooth freezing, having to restart network/Alien Dalvik/the phone itself to get something working… I’ve experienced them all and masochistically already learned to live with them because I can once again supplement the sorely lacking functionality (usable browser, navigation, Spotify…) with newer Android apps that couldn’t work on the outdated Alien Dalvik before.

But the patience is wearing thin, at this point I’m just waiting for any viable (i.e. non-privacy invading) alternative to switch and end the unbroken chain of systems from the same gene pool that started with N900 (earlier as well, but speaking of phone functionality). I think I’m finally done and I no longer think that Sailfish OS will ever be a modern, usable and stable OS.

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#25

Yes, i did, thus my summary of what i saw. (I also read just about every thread as it comes in)

Obviously it was not meant for my benefit, but to make these claims less nebulous. Hopefully others could see that and say that they are affected to, provide logs, supplementary observations or similar. And there could also be some healthy discussion on that some things are opinion or feature requests in disguise.

You do realize that Jolla basically has to reverse-engineer the modem control interface? No help from the manufacturer, no documentation. And to add insult to injury, they cannot distribute modem firmware. Such firmware is notoriously flaky and tested until it works (worst kind of development) with official drivers. Any reasonable, seemingly unrelated, change in behaviour can have really funky consequences.
And if the problems doesn’t reproduce at all for them (like is the case for me)… it really isn’t as easy as you make it out to be.

It is entirely possible that it is the current state of BlueZ on Linux in general - so while they can and probably do contribute, it is also somewhat out of their hands. Google probably have more people working on the Android Bluetooth stack than Jolla has employees.
Are you suggesting they buy a BMW to test with?

That’s a feature request. Maybe it is not even doable to surrender enough low-level control to the Android side to make that happen - what then?

… Shall I go on?

Fair, detailed and constructive is the way to go - ranting isn’t.
How about contributing logs to some of the issues instead?

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#26

@attah I’ve read your most recent post and I honestly can’t work out if you’re actually being serious or just having a joke with us.

Nevertheless…

I would like you to imagine for a moment that you have decided to treat yourself and have bought a new sports car from a small manufacturer with not many resources. You’ve driven it for a few weeks and have found a few problems.

The brakes only work intermittently, the engine keeps cutting out several times a day for no apparent reason and the windscreen wipers only seem to work when its sunny outside. Also the instrument display keeps flickering and you can’t always see what speed you are doing. Finally the car radio can only connect to one radio station.

You’ve done a bit of searching on the various specialist forums and some helpful people have given you some workarounds. You can get the engine working again by pulling over to the side of the road, putting the handbrake on, putting the gearbox in neutral and pumping the accelerator 7 times. The engine will then start and run until it happens again. The ‘experts’ tell you that another solution may be to take the engine out of the car, clean it and then re-install it - but that’s a lot of complicated work which, as a simple driver, you’d rather avoid if you could. The windscreen wiper issue can apparently be fixed by drilling a hole in the windscreen and fitting a manual lever through the glass. You can then operate the wipers by hand when it rains. The radio issue has been around for years and the manufacturer seems unable or unwilling to address it. The brakes are more of a problem and there currently seems no solution to getting them working reliably.

You therefore decide to take the car back to the dealership who sold it to you to get the problems fixed.

The dealer (who is not the manufacturer) tries to explain the situation …

“You do realise the brakes were reverse engineered from a BMW saloon don’t you? We had no help and no documentation. When saloon car brakes are installed in a sports car the change in behaviour can have really flaky consequences so you shouldn’t really expect them to work properly … And the engine, that was sourced from Jaguar - we didn’t design it so its completely out of our hands; Jaguar probably have more people working on this engine than our entire company! Oh, the radio, yes sir, if you want it to connect to more than one radio station then that is an enhancement request, not a problem.”

What are you going to do?

Are you going to simply say “Oh, I am sorry I understand now, your company has all these problems with their product so I really shouldn’t complain. Yes, I know I paid for my shiny new sports car but it it would be unreasonable of me to expect it to work and drive properly - your company has so few resources that I should just be grateful the car came with 4 wheels and drives properly every other Sunday.”

Or are you going to say “Actually, thanks for telling me the history of how my sports car was designed and built but, as someone who paid money for this car, I don’t really care - what I care about is that I expect it to work reliably as a car I can use every day.”

In legal terms this last thing is called ‘fitness for purpose’ and applies in consumer and contract law to all products where a product is not wholly defined by a specification or a sample. In other words a product sold as a car (or a mobile phone OS) has to work reliably and do the things that a car (or mobile phone OS) would reasonably be expected to do at the time it was sold (i.e. 2021).

Now, do you see my point?

Oh, and just because you call one of my posts a rant doesn’t make it so. I could equally call your post a rant, but that wouldn’t make it so either.

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#27

:smiley:
Thanks for THAT story!!!

Please continue (both!), popcorn is already in the pan …

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#28

I’m very sorry but the popcorn has crashed and needs re-flashing before you can eat it :wink:

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#29

Trying to add some substantial post but do not believe it helped or will help…

#30

Just imagine said small car manufacturer would give you the car for free, giving you plenty of time to find out all it’s "quirks and features"™ and only require payment should you decide to get the optional NOS installation for maximum performance…

6 Likes
#31

If you only ever used the free version then I agree, that is a different matter entirely. Although there will still be a license agreement between the user and Jolla which should cover how the product is to be used and supported by them.

But as soon as you buy a Sailfish X license then you become a paying customer who has a legal contract with Jolla for the supply and support of the product you have bought. This will be covered by both the terms of the contract with Jolla and the provisions of consumer contract law.

And until you have bought that license you cannot test out either (a) the “quirks and features” of the functionality (e.g. Exchange, Predictive text, Android support, etc) that the paid product brings, or (b) how that additional functionality interacts with, or adversely affects the functionality of the free product (e.g. bluetooth and android, system crashes, etc).

There would be a strong legal argument (I speak as a lawyer who specialises in contract law) that once you had bought the functionality of the paid product (the performance and reliability of this being dependant on the existence of the free base product and how the two integrate), would mean that the two (free base + paid additions) would effectively be indistinguishable when considering the reliability and performance of the product as a whole. Hence anybody who has bought the paid product should be provided with a phone that works reliably as any other mobile phone might reasonably be expected to work in 2021.

Furthermore there is an implicit requirement to separately purchase hardware to run even the free product on, so unless you had already purchased a compatible (Sony) phone with no original intention to ever re-flash it to Sailfish (i.e. you original bought it to always run Android and then only decided, later, to flash to Sailfish) then even the ‘free’ product is not without cost to the user.

Finally, do you not think that there is an ethical obligation on Jolla to deliver a properly working product? And that is aside from the fact that it makes good business sense - a reputation for a flaky, partially working product is hard, if not impossible, to ever recover from.

2 Likes
#32

That’s a good list. Most of those seems to be getting attention.

Summarizing

  • Unclear status - hopefully fixed with browser uplift
  • Very stealthy bug, being looked at.
  • Minor - being looked at.
  • Minor - fixed, upcoming.
  • Android apps are finicky :man_shrugging: Fixed according to report in release notes for 4.1.
  • Now this one is pretty bad. At least it is being looked at. (the workaround is trivial…)
  • Self-inflicted
  • Sounds quite bad, but very few people affected it seems… logs missing.

Maybe i have huffed too much Copium, but seems pretty OK to me.

#33

Interesting discussion, it stated that wasn’t intended to sound like a rant, but it become a rant. Personally if I was so unhappy with sfos I would reverted it back to Android and become a happy phone user.

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#34

Rant - “a tirade of empty turgid talk, using bombastic language noisily and intemperately” (Oxford English Dictionary definition).

No ranting here - just a group of people with differing viewpoints offering their take on a particular situation. :grinning: I presume this is allowed on the forum?

And if you’re referring to me (and I am just guessing here) I am a happy phone user. I came to Sailfish from my old Nokia N9 via Blackberry 10 in between. I am hoping that, one day, Sailfish will be a viable alternative to those now dead OSs and the market big boys - but that day is not today. And it may not be the day for years to come, or maybe even ever. So I watch and wait and am content with using my iPhone 12 as my reliable daily driver and my Sailfish XA2 as a hobby phone to play with.

If I thought Sailfish wasn’t worth anything I would have bailed long ago, but I don’t like Android and my tolerance of ios is simply there because there is nothing out there which is better and that I can rely on at the moment.

I am happy to admit that I am not part of the “All Hail Jolla” brigade. I see the company as one like many others, delivering a niche product to a market of consumer enthusiasts (corporate Aurora clients aside); a company that is deserving of support, but not to the extent that denies the reality of poor quality and doesn’t allow any descent or criticism of such. Only by recognising and understanding what’s wrong will they hopefully get it right in the future.

Is that so unreasonable?

6 Likes
#35

That was never my intention.

Exactly! And by being concrete and precise we can hopefully do just that.
All i asked was to not make nebulous claims of that everything is crap, and to have a modicum of understanding of what is physically/humanly/financially possible.

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#36

Wait, is anyone? I thought pretty much all of those people left once the charismatic leader (Marc Dillon) jumped ship.

There are many things to criticise about Sailfish and Jolla, but in most cases, when people make these posts about how frustrated they are, it essentially boils down to “I’m experiencing some annoying bugs and if they aren’t given top priority I will move to the United States and sue you”. I’m personally severely annoyed by several bugs, like the fact that it hasn’t been possible to take screenshots on the tablet for about four years (if not more) (surely it can’t be that hard to fix?), or the fact that the update to 4.0 broke some critical component in the tablet that locked me (and one other person) out of using it, or the fact that the fingerprint reader on the Xperia 10 II doesn’t want to recognise my fingerprint on occasion, or the fact that the browser is still two years or so behind modern Firefox, or … But writing lengthy blog posts about it won’t fix the bugs any faster.

1 Like
#37

By no means I am referring to anyone in particular, and I do respect ppl and I want to be polite too. What I do not like in the discussion is that fundamental things are not taken into account. SFOS runs on “borrowed” devices with experimental drivers on which there is practically little control. For me this is the main issue, and that’s why camera is not that good, battery consumption is worse, radio signal issues, etc. At the same time Sony’s AOSP programme is the best option available for SFOS. Future releases will improve things with 10 II, as they did previously for 10, XA2, X, improvements might be limited and that can be a hard fact too.

It seems like re-inventing the wheel for each new xperia model ported into SFOS, I do not know if it’s called planned obsolescence or simple competition, again the reality is that Android and Apple can push huge resources, provide improvements and eliminate the weaker ;-(

2 Likes
#38

‘Crap’ - your word, not mine.

I have never made a nebulous claim which has not been backed up by either a proper ‘concrete’ bug report by myself based on personal experience, or a contribution to a bug report posted by another user …

What more are you demanding?

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#39

So, what are you suggesting?

That this forum is completely pointless because nobody takes any notice of contributor’s views in terms of what bugs are important, what bugs should be fixed, and how to prioritise those bugs?

I believe Jolla themselves have already said that they have no real interest in consumers as customers and that the community is really only being used as a ‘free’ test bed for new Sailfish releases. This being so I would have thought they’d be very interested in what contributors find with each new release?

But I guess that if you’re right we might as well all pack up and go home because we’re wasting our time …

#40

I do understand all this, but does that mean that we, as customers, should be then happy to put up with a sub-standard product as a result? It is Jolla’s choice what they use as a platform for their mobile OS, not their customers.

Jolla are selling Sailfish as a ‘a European alternative to dominating mobile operating systems’ (Jolla website, about Sailfish) so they are clearly positioning their offering as an alternative to ios and Android (what other interpretation could there be for this statement?).

Am I the only one who thinks that this is misleading? Am I the only one who thinks that the current state of Sailfish cannot realistically be compared with the maturity, reliability, functionality and app ecosystem of ios and Android?

I know that there are a lot of very enthusiastic proponents of Sailfish on this forum, but sometimes, just sometimes, you have to be realistic.

If Jolla are selling a product, then regardless of the history and difficulties of how it is designed, the technology choices made by the company who produce the product, and the borrowed systems that it depends upon, shouldn’t the paying customer be entitled to a product that actually does what it says on the tin?

#41

There’s one thought that comes to mind when reading this and other posts of the like:
Expectation is proportional the possibility of frustration

When I first decided to buy a Sailfish X license I knew this was a ‘bricolage’ project. Having flashed a few different custom ROMs before, and fiddling around with TWRP. Sailfish X, despite the marketing, was and is a ‘hobbyist OS’. 50 euros in license fee (paid for usage rights of certain apps, not for the hardware adaption layer, mind you) is nowhere near the figure development would cost.

From my point of view it’s a problem to judge SFOS for Sony devices to be anything else than that. Sailfish X is - putting it a bit pointedly - a custom ROM developed by a small and smart company. But without the big vendors (Broadcom, Sony, hardware manufacturers ) it’ll remain just that: a custom ROM.

Corporate customers are a different story: OMP (was that the name?) will most probably have access to all hardware components, allowing for a proper hardware adaptation for Aurora OS.

#42

I don’t know where this quote comes from but I like it very much!

You make a very good point, and you are clearly technically astute to recognise Sailfish for what it currently is - a hobby OS.

Part of the issue is that people do buy Sailfish X, not unreasonably expecting it to be a properly working product and are then disappointed because it clearly isn’t and Jolla either don’t fix problems at all, or take months or years to fix them (the reasons - lack of resources, ‘borrowed’ technology beyond their control, no money, etc - behind why this may be are, and should be, irrelevant to the paying customer). So there is inevitably an expectations mismatch, disappointment, frustration and the inevitable reputation for poor quality. This is what multiple posters have highlighted and what Jolla needs to address.

Incidentally, the amount of money, the price, paid for the product (known as ‘consideration’ in legal terminology) is actually irrelevant and need not be related in any way to the cost of the product. The important fact is that money (consideration) changed hands in exchange for the product. A bargain was made - money for a product which then legally has to be fit for purpose, or conform to a specification, or match a sample - whichever the contract of sale and consumer law stipulates.

1 Like
#43

But isn’t this exactly the reason for the ‘free’ version of the hardware adaptation of the Sailfish X devices? They don’t build those adaptations for free, I’d say it would cost more than just a few weeks of a few developers. You then, or any new user, could test their device with the free version and therefore know if they want to add the license for the Android layer, the predictive text & MFE?