Very buggy OS on Xperia 10 II

I think that’s a good assumption. I’m in the UK and have downloaded all of the new location files that I could for all the countries. On my XA2, on 4.1, if I’m in a town or other populated area I get a ‘near fix’ quite quickly within a minute. This is presumably the location of the nearest cell tower? Often this is half a mile away or so, so fairly useless for traffic navigation as it shows me in the right part of the right town, but on the wrong place on the wrong road. Getting the actual fix usually still takes another 10 to 20 minutes. However if I’m in the country, with limited cell coverage, I get no near fix at all and the phone can take up to an hour to get any location fix at all, even outside with a cloudless sky.

I think the main issue with XA2 GPS is the provided driver (AOSP binary blob), in different xperia models running the same version of SFOS GPS works as expected. I guess to be fixed will require the involvement of third party developers which very likely cannot be done, besides might not be a simple fix either.

Anyway, that’s my speculation and the experience using it is rather poor, and I am not going to comment further ;-(

ps clouds should not affect GPS signal strength.

Perhaps this is another good reason for Jolla changing direction away from Sony towards a hardware partnership (e.g. Fairphone) that might be more controllable and sustainable without having to re-engineer it all again for every new and different Sony phone that comes along. Access to the lower level hardware adaptations seems a must to ensure that stuff works and is reliable - camera, GPS, network and so on.

I said that many years now, but I am not Jolla neither Fairphone, there was an announcement in a WMC some many years ago with FP2 for collaboration, but was never materialised to an official port. The reality, without knowing details, is that both companies are fragile and afraid such collaboration (see limited resources?). Also do not take for granted FP drivers will be free of bugs either.

Agreed. What caught my eye though is that Fairphones are now selling through Virgin Media (Fairphone Phone Deals | Contract Deals | Virgin Media) - a ready made international distribution network.

So my thoughts were idly turning to the idea (just in my head of course, not a reality!) of a Fairphone pre-flashed with Sailfish, a locked bootloader (so more secure), properly engineered in terms of hardware adaptation with a proper bug-fixing strategy and a long term vision based on one phone only for an extended period of time that could be upgraded with better cameras and a faster this or that. This would obviate the need to cope with a brand new and completely different phone every two years that has to be more or less re-engineered from scratch and the huge multitude of seemingly unsolvable issues this brings. Better for the environment too.

Oh, what could be …

1 Like

check this sailfish-os-for-fairphone-3 not much interest unfortunately, it also seems that community prefers sony.

I will be bold here and say our community is wrong (and get corrected as to why but thats ok :slight_smile: ). Fairphone 3+ will be around for many more years in a stable configuration allowing for consistent bug fixes. New modules can be isolated and supported in time.
Chipset is snapdragon 632 so very similar to the Xperia 10 so not starting from total scratch there also.
Perhaps it is more a chicken and the egg problem here. All we get is Sony official ports so that what we like.

Would petitioning Jolla to support fairphone 3+, would it fall on deaf ears or how much of the active paying userbase be needed to get a reply ?

Also I think we are off topic here also…and high jacked the thread.

2 Likes

I gave a try for the paid license of Sailfish on my Xperia 10 II and i must admit that it’s such a desapointment that i had to reflash Android. I had most of the bug commented in this thread and some are really a pain in the arse so i totally agree with the owner of this post. Now waiting an update to clean all this bugs off and i’ll be back on Sailfish OS for sure !

AFAIR these are nearly the same people that had released the Hamattan version with nearly endless list of bugs … then were forced to fix them and actually did with 1.2

So the mentality in former Nokia seems to be still former Nokia - that bugs are quite OK
I mean there is a huge problem with this mentality and they really have to sit down and fix bugs, because with every newer version it is getting worse for me. On the daily phone I still have 3.3.0.16
And if I could I would put the same version on the 10 II which cost more than 350,- and is laying around unused, because of the bugs there.

I fully support you in your claims and statements

regards

2 Likes

The reason why I started the thread was to know if it was just really me or whether other people were experiencing the same things, and I am sad to see that I am not the only one. Some of the bugs I encounter every day completely break the phone and as such I’m struggling to keep it as my daily driver. I know that Jolla, like other people have said, is a small company, but I really don’t understand why bugs can just be accepted because of this, I don’t get why it is seen as wrong to give an honest opinion of one’s experience with SFOS or expect that regardless of the size of the company a product can work. Again, I really really REALLY want this to work, in the same way I stayed with my BB 10 for years hoping that maybe Blackberry would pick the project up again. When SFOS works, it’s so good! I enjoy using it so much more than Android or iOS. If I really didn’t care, I would’ve switched already, as someone previously suggested, but this needs to work or else I don’t know which other OS could compete against Apple/Google. As Steve said before, you can’t pitch something as the alternative to the duopoly but at the same time expect that it is okay for crucial parts of the OS to not work well.

About the holidays I mentioned before, I didn’t mean to say that everyone should be working 24/7 without rest, I was saying that it is not normal for a company to just stop and drop everything, without any releases to a paid software (regardless of whether that is for licensing, development costs, etc. I don’t buy software with a breakdown of where that money is going to, I buy a piece of software because I want to use it and thus expect it to work with my device, especially if I bought said device because it was announced that at some point it would be compatible). There are ways for keeping a company active while parts of it are on holiday (maybe that’s the case here, but then why haven’t we had any updates in weeks??).

Again, I really like SFOS, it’s just so hard to use sometimes! I’m starting to trust the OS less and less, as I’ve been in business calls where audio just crashed and I had to use someone else’s phone because I didn’t have enough time to restart, among other bad experiences that make me feel like it’s not ready yet. As some have suggested, maybe changing Sony for Fairphone or at least trying to collaborate on a deeper level with Sony so as to access all the low-level stuff which would make development easier and better? I don’t know, I’m not here to tell how to direct a big company like Jolla is, but maybe a roadmap or more frequent bug fixes would be nice.

5 Likes

I guess some people may get a little defensive if the overall tone a post seem to generalize a lot and their experiences are completely different.

Speaking as someone who owned 6 different SFOS devices so far I would consider my Xperia 10 II to be the best Sailfish device yet and my primary phone for quite a while now.
But I have to admit, I would have replaced the phone withing a few days should it ever have turned out to be as bad as some posts seem to imply.

6 Likes

I guess a lot will depend upon what parts of Sailfish you actually use. So if you don’t use Exchange to synchronise with Office365 then you are not going to experience a whole load of extremely frustrating (especially if you rely on it for your work) issues with the email and calendar. Similarly if you don’t use Android then the fact that it loses network connectivity regularly and you can’t use bluetooth won’t matter to you at all. Some people don’t even use phones to make old fashioned phone calls these days - they use SIP or Facebook Messenger calls, or Whatsapp, or whatever - so if you’re one of those users then you won’t notice that making calls the old fashioned way sometimes doesn’t work, or you can’t hear, or you get cut off and so on.

The point here is one of respect - just because a user (any user) doesn’t experience some of the problems that other users do experience doesn’t mean that those problems don’t exist or are automatically down to ‘your hardware device is faulty’ rather than them being a problem with Sailfish, or Android, or …

And equally just because a lot of users are experiencing these problems doesn’t mean that a lot of others are not enjoying ‘trouble free motoring’ with Sailfish either.

Everybody should respect each other’s views and recognise that, actually, we’re all here for a common purpose - to try and make things better. And you do that by having open, honest and truthful conversations about both the good points and the bad points - not by denying another person’s experiences. Would you agree?

4 Likes

I’m sorry if the post’s tone was too aggressive, my objective wasn’t to insult or generalise, but rather to share my experience, which might be different from yours, inquire whether others are experiencing the same and if so, why things are the way they are.

I’m not flashing Android back into the phone because I’d rather live with these quirks than go back to Google, but it’d be great to have a phone that works really well too! I know for a fact that it isn’t due to the hardware because I’ve used this phone for many months with 0 issues on Android, so it has to be software and the good thing with software is that it can be gradually fixed! I’ll just be patient, but it’d be great if Jolla could also speed up the release of bug fixes a bit too.

1 Like

I agree with your past few posts, you seem to be able to express my frustrations quite lucidly also. Both of us have expressed our frustrations constructively but there feels like resistance or something else coming through the replies. This is such a small community of users I would expect different attitudes.

I find myself more and more recently asking myself, what is keeping me to stick with it, why should I be this frustrated while everybody elses devices is care free it seems ( other SF, Android, iOS). I don’t have a positive outlook. I have no idea about what the vision is or where this is going for SFOS in general. I know this is a shared frustration across everybody and it is just accepted.

Ill finish on a positive, Android app compatibility has been greatly improved to such an extent over the past few releases that is really an amazing job. I just wish this could have been consolidated into a more stable platform across all the user test cases you mentioned (actually I finished on a negative dam). This should be possible to do or am I naive ?

1 Like

I agree with you too. I don’t understand why it’s my phone that doesn’t work while some people seem to have very clean experiences with SFOS!
To be fair, though, ever since I flashed SFOS I’ve noticed I use my phone way less. It could be either because it’s not engineered for maximum retention or because the glitches don’t make me want to use my phone :joy:

Well, I do use Android, funnily to work around other deficiencies with SFOS, such as something as basic as a browser being virtually unusable with many sites. These things, together with the lack of BT support on AD are well documented, though.

I have to admit I may be using 3G calls less than many others (knowing who’s behind bringing SIP to SFOS may provide a clue :grinning:) but the fact I haven’t experienced this kind of issues even once was the reason why I mentioned the possibility there may be something else involved than a general issue with with this part of SFOS.

At no point were any of my posts meant to be disrespectful or an attempt to play down issues someone may have experienced with the X10II.

To be frank, why some people have a completely awful time with their X10 ii, (flickering screens, no wifi, constant crashes, etc) whilst others, presumably with the same 4.X.X software release, don’t seems really odd to me - there should at least be some consistency of problems between identical hardware and identical software. What is so different that some users have a really great experience whilst others have an awful one?

I often wonder this myself. I really don’t want people to think I’m exaggerating or lying about these things. I should maybe record them to document them a bit more rather than just say “this crashes often”, “this doesn’t work”, but I’ve been so busy recently that I haven’t been able to. Is there an email address that I could send logs or videos to Jolla so that they can take a more precise look?

1 Like

This is probably the most important question to ask.

1 Like

Considering the complexity of a Smartphone including all software layers, we most likly have to live with the fact that there will be always bugs - with all systems.

This does not mean that we should accept bugs - to the contrary, ideally all bugs should be resolved. In realtity, debugging competes with developing new features or supporting new hardware.

So it comes down to a matter of priorities. Here, community can (and to a certain extend does) help. Since some bugs are affecting everyday use of the phone more severly while other bugs only affect a very limited number of user’s or are not even bugs but simply missing features, we might help Jolla with clearly announcing how serious a bug affects everyday use.

Many bugs mentioned in this thread affect everyday use but not all users are encountering these bugs. Accordingly, in a second step help Jolla with indicating whether or not we are affected by a bug. In part, this is done by “upvoting” a bug report but doing a bit more like indicating our subjective “score” of a bug in an explicit comment might help Jolla with adjusting priorities in bugfixing.

Just some thoughts that came into my mind - please apologize for being a bit off topic and only stating what most of you will have considered anyway

2 Likes