Finally! Someone shared a QR-code for Beta-market (a teaser set of apps offered to beta testers) in telegram. Now private unlocked Aurora devices on sale can actually install Aurora apps. The catalog is rather limited. It includes some random sailfish apps AND some new Aurora stuff. Not all software at auroraos.ru/applications is included but there are some important things not listed there too. The Beta-market includes
Apps for the major Russian mobile operators
Banking: VTB app and webview apps of other popular banks (Sber, Alfa, Tinkoff),
Yandex Taxi (Yes!.. Sh*t, it enforces Yandex passport) Aeroflot (avia) and RZD (rail) tickets
Navigation: CityGuide (supports pro fuctionality for taxi drivers), Navitel, 2gis and more
MyOffice, R7 Office and multiple corporate document sharing and processing frameworks
No. AuroraOS has no Android support and never had it.
Alien Dalvik was the first (or one of the first) bits that got removed in Sailfish OS RUS even before the forked OS got rebranded as Aurora. Android emulation is not supported in any way.
In fact OMP tries to convert Android developers and make them port their Android apps to Aurora. Recentrly OMP announced support for Flutter and Kotlin in Aurora.
There is one real SFOS/Aurora banking app from VTB bank (It is a large bank under all imaginable EU suxxions). Another true Russian banking app is SBPay (payment service from the Russian national card processing center. Similar to GooglePay or ApplePay). It is supposed to be rolled out soon. Source 1Source 2. Other banks still provide only webviews of their online pages. The difference is that there is some assurance that they work, while the same servers would not function under SFOS browser.
The largest bank in Russia Sberbank issued a public statement that they were going to create an official app for SFOS years ago, but they did nothing. The press release was revoked after my formal inquiry as a client about the state of development. Now Sber is a founding member of a consortium that declared creation of another mobile OS based on AOSP - StarOS. There are smartTVs and smart speakers from Sber in any large Russian electronics shop.
There is an android emulator application (called Avroid), but it was not published yet. We’re waiting for 18th, november for presentation of Aurora Rustore. And for whose who asked if the devises available on the market. They were, several hundred devices for discount price 155 - 170 € each. (R570Е phone and F+ Life Tab Plus (Мобильные устройства на платформе ОС Аврора) )
Thank you for trying out and reporting.
Regarding UI: besides from style issues (fonts, icons etc.) are there any different heuristics (e.g. gestures etc.?) that affect (or improve) the UX?
Thank you @davidrasch@olf@remote - the article shades indeed some light on the improvements. I spotted only one new gesture though (apart from a vertical swipe instead of a horizontal swipe for changing screens):
However, I wonder whether the change from a horizontal swipe to a vertical swipe (just as in SFOS 1.0) has some implications on the in-app gestures because it allows for instance a gesture within the browser that lets you get back easier to a previous page (atm it is a bit incoonsistent with other apps like, for instance the file manager)
From the intro music:
““Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a f*cking big television, choose one of two mediocre phone systems”.
Claims hundreds of thousands of installations.
Vetted by the FSB for security (guessing such phones are boot-locked).
10 different phone models.
Selling to the public.
They based the new UI on iDroid (did they lose access to Lipstick?)
The video shows off ambiences.
Producing 16-bit version.
