I think even a single “WIP” topic for each the different devices would be already sufficient.
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I don’t have a good answer to this. Maybe one thread per phone release with all the updates and more-or-less official comms, no matter the aspect.
What I do know is that I have enough respect for @jovirkku - and his decades of experience - to take whatever he’d propose seriously when it comes to flushing a release pipeline.
Maybe the reason this is now rough to think about is that it feels a bit like bike-shedding.
Whatever the solution for communication ends up being, it would be dope if it came soon and with something tangible 
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I must congratulate you on noticing and articulating the systemic issue plaguing the Jolla’s communications.
Here is my proposition how to do better:
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Set up a process, where once a week Jolla reports what has been done in the last seven days. The report would be a list of officially supported devices, where each device would have bullet points explaining work done, ideally with links to commits and other evidence. The various device variants should be combined to prevent unnecessary work duplication.
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The report contents should be written immediately upon conclusion of the described work, to avoid issues with deadlines and unexpected situations. I suggest to publish the report early in a week to be ready for unexpected community reactions, or other community engagement.
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If nothing has been done with a device, do not omit it from the report. Instead, state that “nothing was done”. It is important, because having this entry forces you to continuously acknowledge that you support the device, until it is removed from the official support. On the reader’s side, it shows that you do track the work done on the specific device.
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Similarly to the hardware report, it would be very nice to have a system report with developments regarding the operating system in general. It is also a great opportunity to engage the community more deeply than the current state of “are we there yet”?
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I bought a device two months ago. The last dead line was July. I will accept the beta version without a camera but this version is not available now too. So, could we be sure that our devices will get an image this year? I like this os but I’m a little bit sad that my 10V will be not used and is in my drawer 
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While every point is formally correct, the chosen language is too harsh IMO. Please take into account where Jolla and its company “culture” is coming from: Never telling anything about content, structure, decision making and planned timelines of their releases. In the past, what Jolla released when was basically their only communication about SailfishOS releases (i.e. zero information was provided in advance), a fact which I often and strongly criticised, especially for the negative, disruptive effects that has for software developers (“hey a surprise for you, we just broke your apps, again”).
In the past few years Jolla improved significantly in this regard and still seems to be on that trajectory (i.e. @rainemak participating in general discussion threads as this one, @jovirkku in many more technical discussions and other sailors when a discussion touches their work, e.g. @pvuorela): Thank you all for doing that despite some backslash), hence criticism should account for that, even though communication is still not fully satisfactory (e.g. compared to other Linux distributors, as RedHat for Fedora or SUSE for OpenSUSE).
P.S.: After all, this is still software development with scarce resources and some external dependencies (e.g. to Sony’s firmwares and software binaries, to many upstream FOSS projects etc.), hence recurring delays are to be expected.
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@Obikawa, are you aware how much of the available resources will go into writing these reports? Furthermore, this is something developers really hate (including me): Instead of progressing with the piles of work ahead, writing reports about the few things one achieved (within a week it will never be much).
Are you aware that most of the work you want to be informed of is happening in the open? You can simply take a look!
Hence I rather wish that Jolla performs even more work directly in the open, instead of staging stuff in their internal source code repositories.
Ultimately, the SCM changelogs @dcaliste gathers already cover most of what you ask for and Jolla provides their biweekly community news: These do provide the regular progress information you are asking for.
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This is something I am currently experiencing, by pushing myself to do increasingly more work with Emacs, Org Roam and setting up workflows and infrastructure for future Literate Programming, on my to-be-built website. This particular problem is a problem of preparation.
However, my intention was a bit different — the previous post is a bag of seeds, thrown with hope of at least one sprouting properly. It is an inspirational idea, an image to think about. The best solutions are those combining many different base concepts — take the A* algorithm for example: it combines two ineffective approaches to routing in order to provide truly efficient results.
Each time I take a look at Sailfish Github, I find myself lost within hundreds of forks and subprojects. This is a very opaque approach to open development. It is a difficult, cultural issue and I am not prepared to argue with it. It takes active consideration each day to balance clarity of a monolithic foundation against versatility of a modular foundation.
Personally, I am not able to comprehend the workspace of Sailfish development, which effectively renders the process closed to me. All I have are the Community News and miscellaneous forum threads I decide to follow.
Maybe. But it’s a result of more than half a year of waiting, not even for the product itself, but actually for any reliable information. I’ve been waiting since February or so, and I still can’t know even just if it is going to take one more week or rather another half a year.
And therefore it’s not about pushing them to release the product (I don’t think one can find any comment of mine demanding that) but merely to inform us with some reasonable frequency.
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Sigh, I have been waiting 10 years for Jolla to provide a release of SailfishOS, I would not clearly define as a beta release.
“And I still can’t know even just if it is going to take one more week or rather another half a year” or multiple years or a another decade or if Jolla will go bankrupt before that without being saved (as it fortunately happened at least twice, i.e. “being saved” in the last minute).
Go use UB ports (ex Ubuntu mobile), PostmarketOS or any other “mobile Linux distribution” (which open source Android distros (AOSP forks) are not): I am pretty sure you will gladly return after a while, despite all shortcomings of SailfishOS and Jolla.
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I’d say that it really doesn’t make much sense to discuss it in this manner. It is all about merely getting some information, so there’s really no use in debating about Jolla’s history, comparing it and its OS to others, and so on. Let’s just expect being better informed (why shouldn’t we?), and that’s all.
Why would I want to use them? I’ve never complained about Sailfish OS. I use it because it suits me the most (of all there is to choose from). Which doesn’t mean that I cannot express disappointment with a few things, lack of proper information having always been the most troublesome. Please kindly note that I do not complain about OS quality, I do not incite debates about bugs (even though some of them haven’t been fixed for years), or actually anything else like that. In fact, my only concern is lack of information (and sometimes actually misinformation).
So, please, let’s not exaggerate. Merely insisting that they post some reliable information from time to time, definitely doesn’t do any harm or damage to Jolla, and should not be seen as if it was almost cutting their throats or something. Let’s be serious…
IMO even just a simple topic like e.g. ”Xperia 10 IV / V support update” on the Announcements forum would do its job very well.
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You see my profile picture!? It shows the neo freerunner. The goal of the project was to make as much open source as possible (even drivers for chips were open source except for the modem because not available on the market). In the result nothing ever worked reliable (i mean nothing, like phone calls etc.) but the hardware was already by far outdated (gprs while the whole world was on umts for minimum 2 or 3 years).
I came the whole way (starting round about 2007) from motorola linux mobile → neo freerunner → ubuntu phone / touch → Sailfish OS.
Long story short: You will not find a mobile phone with a better compromise of state of the art hardware, reliability, percentage of open source parts, tweakability, android app support etc. etc.
I totally agree with @olf, try an other system (or even distribution)! See you back soon…!
The guys from Jolla are doing a great job. They provided a reliable solution always in the past. Maybe later then announced but they always delivered! And isn’t the expectation and looking forward to next milestone the greatest joy!?
So please let them do their work in a calm social climate with the speed that is suitable for them without rushing them. When the next product is out you’ll have at least 8 years of fun with it so i don’t think a few months should make such a big difference.
And so please stop spaming into this forum as soon as the most little opportunity arises in some thread that they are late. It helps nobody. It puts pressure on them. It makes the usage of this technical forum totally annoying when 40% of the threads you dive into end up with Jollyboys being late. thx
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Your rant has literally nothing in common with what I’ve been writing about, i.e. periodically providing short status update about development progress. So guess who’s spamming here.
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My guess is you, the guy has posted once in who knows how many months, vs you spamming the same wall of text in any thread that is barely relevant to timing, pls get a grip and don’t spiral this into what actually spam is bs
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It does, unfortunately. @Fubo asking you to “please stop spamming this forum as soon as the most little opportunity arises in some thread that they are late.” is well understandable.
If you ever did software development of non-trivial projects, you will know that reaching a certain target almost always takes longer than expected and hence questions as “when is it ready?” must be (or “only can be”) answered with “when its ready”. I dissected that in a bit more detail in another discussion thread where you posed the same complaints.
Actually this approach is much preferable to having a marketing department setting a release date in advance and the software is released in whatever state just to keep the timeline (set for marketing events etc.).
Re-iterating “It is all about merely getting some information”, “Merely insisting that they post some reliable information from time to time” and so on and so forth does not make any sense:
- You already stated that there is no alternative to SailfishOS for you, hence you will wait … as long it takes to release installation images for the Xperias 10 IV and 10 V.
- You know that these installation images are in the works. What would you gain from status reports regularly telling you exactly that (“we are working on it”)?
Entertainment? Maybe. But status reports do not foster progress by any means, i.e. these installation images are not released any faster by reporting progress or even more so by asking for reports. -
“definitely doesn’t do any harm or damage to Jolla”
This is not true: As already pointed out, reporting requires resources to do so. Which slows down the progress you are so eager to see the results of. - Furthermore I cannot see how any detailed information about progress would be helpful for you, as you do not seem to intend to participate in the development process.
- And you can watch many aspects of the development process and its progress closely at GitHub, if you want to. Why don’t you?
- Last but not least there are more important topics than the release dates of installation images for the Xperias 10 IV and 10 V, at least for me (YMMV).
As already stated, @dcaliste provides a summary at GitHub and Jolla provides their biweekly community news: These provide the regular progress information you are asking for.
But I know this is all just rhetoric, from your side and from my side.
What you seem to really want are concise timelines and release dates.
But to name such would really do harm to Jolla, if they cannot keep them, which is very likely in software development as pointed out earlier.
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I’m this > < close to believing every time someone moans or bitches about release dates or missed imaginary deadlines, Jolla will push the release back by a day.
The fact you think, that because you paid X amount for the phone, would make you entitled to be notified of the progress is a bit weak imho. I would totally understand, if Jolla had already charged you for the paid version, but in reality you paid Sony, and now you want to hold Jolla somehow responsible for the consequences of your purchase decision, and they would have to cater for you.
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Absolutely pathetic. Of which Jolla’s @rainemak giving likes to posts bashing criticism of Jolla’s lack of communication is the best symbol.
Bees don’t waste their time explaining to flies that honey is better than shit, so I won’t, either. Keep this mutual admiration society rolling.
Oh, and one last remark to @olf: If I had such an approach of “it’s ready when it’s ready” to people, I would have never achieved things like Developer Hero award from BlackBerry, Evangelist Award from Nokia, Symbian Affiliate Partner from Symbian Ltd, UIQ Partner from UIQ Technology, and a few less important ones. We simply use different measures.
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Wow giving you a title is like a death sentence for the company
Oh, how does that relate to your nagging questions for development timelines and release dates, or to the topic of this discussion thread?
I think you are diverging. 
Come on, please be a bit more patient and do not blow the release timing for the installation images for Xperia 10 IV and V out of proportion. BTW, I have an Xperia 10 V lying around, too.
I always valued your technical contributions much, because they were always concise and helpful. A stark contrast to this single topic, which makes you go ballistic. So let us return to discussing technical stuff, because this discussion (rsp. “discussing this”) has not been fruitful for anybody AFAICT.
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Im in the same shoes. Bought an Xperia IV one year ago. The delay to my understanding is mostly because of them waiting for Sony. I think Jolla is doing a great job so far. They have had some real rough sea to navigate through. (Russia/Ukraine), it set them back for a while. They have handled everything exceptionally well in my opinion considering everything.
Allso there are big powers behind the curtains that dont want open source privacy focused things like Sailfish to succeed or become too popular. One of the tactics they have been known to use is to put paid bad actors to troll the forums with the main goal to create negativity and bad atmosphere.
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well, the reason I also started this topic was because there is/was only very little to no information about progress at all. I definitely was afraid SFOS is dead.
That being said, I do not want to see going this topic down the drain because of people bashing each other, although can’t deny that I stand with @wetab73 here- a very least bit of information neither complicates nor delays a release and nothing else he or we said here (I think).
So I can only repeat, single and simple “Work In Progress” (WIP) topic for each device here in the forums would be completely satisfying for me and I assume for almost everyone else as well - and if it is just something like “continue debugging …” or “still waiting for Sony” or whatever like once every week, I guess people would be even happy if happening once a month- and that is definitely not asked to much.
In the end we all just want the same.
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