Comment by raimue | Hacker News Reader

Comment by raimue | Hacker News Reader

Half a year ago in September, I left Sailfish OS and Jolla after I had exclusively used "alternative" mobile operating systems. I started with the Nokia N900, after that I had the Nokia N9, and then both the Jolla and Jolla C with Sailfish OS.

The UI concepts of Sailfish OS were great, the gestures were simple and intuitive. However, it lacked so many other features. The Android emulator was only compatible with apps for Android 4.4. Although being marketed as secure and privacy-aware, users have no control over apps, as there is no mandatory access control or any other permission system. Remember, this OS has been in development for over five years by now. Also, many parts of the UI stayed closed source, although Jolla promised from the beginning they want to release more open source components. If they wanted contributors, they would have more likely contributed to user-visible stuff like the mail app — not to some lower level middle-ware that is open source.

All of this and some more reasons caused me to finally pull the plug and switch to Android. I wrote about it in lengthy details here: https://raimue.blog/2018/01/09/goodbye-sailfish-os-and-jolla...

"parts of the UI stayed closed source"

If anything is closed, except drivers they'd likely be forced to accept binaries for, I wouldn't even consider the OS. Who do they think their target audience is? I imagine most people looking into an alternative mobile OS are well aware of the slippery cliff that is proprietary software. It's the whole point of looking around. I'm looking for full control so I don't get stuck with someone elses bad choices yet again.

Do you develop for iOS?

> Who do they think their target audience is?

Large corporate clients like the Russian postal service. While Jolla has always drawn on bug reports and some contributed code by hackers who are passionate about owning a cool, supposedly open-source phone, the company has never seen that audience as big enough to generate profit. Jolla has been striving for years to win adoption from sectors that don’t really care if the code is completely open or not.

How about another angle: Android is Open Sourced and much powerful than SailfishOS. It's much easier for their target audiences to targeting Android than their OS.

> Android is Open Sourced

Only partially, the ASOP does not run on anything because of the vast amount of blobs and basic drivers missing and people are maintaining open-source reimplementation of the gapps to make even the most basic apps working.

True of course, but: 1) Any other open source OS would have exactly the same problems. And 2) They wouldn’t be any easier for them to solve, so why not concentrate efforts an solving it on AOSP which already has an ecosystem?

Yours is an argument why all struggling OSS mobile OSes are struggling, not particularly why AOSP has problems. Surely if even AOSP is struggling to solve these issues, what chance do the others have?

> Any other open source OS would have exactly the same problems

Not to the same degree, Linux still has some blobs to run on modern computers but nowhere near as much as Android. Android needs blobs for absolutely anything. And you don't need an equivalent of the Gapps on Linux, it would be like something as common as systemd would be proprietary.

> Yours is an argument why all struggling OSS mobile OSes are struggling, not particularly why AOSP has problems. Surely if even AOSP is struggling to solve these issues, what chance do the others have?

Google does not care any more about open-source on Android, the current open-source bits are just there because of legacy history, they close all the open-source parts step by step. The Gapps used to be open-source at the beginning. AOSP isn't struggling, it's just there's no open-source movement.

> Not to the same degree, Linux still has some blobs to run on modern computers but nowhere near as much as Android.

Uhh, come again? Android driver blobs are for the Linux kernel that Android uses, and OEMs don't bother mainlining their drivers so Linux is no better than Android, by definition.

> The Gapps used to be open-source at the beginning

This is flat-out wrong. GApps were never part of AOSP- or open-source.AOSP included alternative open source apps that offered similar functionality (like a mail client)

> AOSP isn't struggling, it's just there's no open-source movement.

Lots of projects are based off AOSP- it's not obvious because they have names like CyanogenMod, LineageOS or Copperhead. There is in fact, a vibrant open-source movement.

> Uhh, come again? Android driver blobs are for the Linux kernel that Android uses, and OEMs don't bother mainlining their drivers so Linux is no better than Android.

Android has one kernel per phone people patched for their own needs, it's much worse than that. You can't take your kernel on a Samsung Phone and run it on an HTC. I can run my Linux kernel on most computers without much issues, good luck running an Android kernel on a random phone.

> Lots of projects are based off AOSP- it's not obvious because they have names like CyanogenMod, LineageOS or Copperhead. There is in fact, a vibrant open-source movement.

CyanogenMod and LineageOS is the same entity, that only makes two big communities. You don't have that many communities because maintaining an Android ROM is much much harder than maintaining a Linux Distribution. That's why the compatibility list for CopperheadOS is ridiculously small.

> CyanogenMod and LineageOS is the same entity, that only makes two big communities

So you agree that there is an AOSP open-source movement? Nevermind it's harder to create a ROM than a Linux desktop distro because drivers are not mainelined by OEMs, but even this will be resolved by the HAL from Android P onwards.

https://f-droid.org/ has a catalouge of ~1500 apps which have absolutely no dependencies on the proprietary google play services.

Those few proprietary apps for which there are no free alternatives (spotify, duolingo) seemed to work fine without the play services.

Not to be dismissive of what f-droid does, but a large majority of the applications available might be generously described as a student's end-of-year project, and often are not very good.

This is not to diminish what is being done, as I do appreciate the option of a wide array of OSS items decoupled from the Google eco-system, but it's nowhere near independence from Google's eco-system. I would hardly say that it's a replacement so much as a novelty at the moment, even though there are a few absolutely golden apps to be found there. (Free advertisement for PassAndroid, the Android equivalent of Passbook from iOS, which does exactly what it advertises)

I strongly disagree. I never used an android phone with google services. Apart from the mentioned unique apps I never missed anything from the FOSS ecosystem. Often the free alternatives are vastly superior over their google counterparts. Also I told all my family and close friends who only grumpily got a smartphone recently to not bother with creating a google account but just install F-Droid. I only got good feedback.

The real benefit here being that there was never any case of malware found in F-Droid. So you really can just tell someone to play around and try out what they like.

Anyway, just listing some of the definitely not student level apps:

Firefox (Fennec and Klar/Focus), OsmAnd, K9 Mail, Nextcloud + Davdroid, Newpipe, Riot, Conversations, Telegram, a bunch of good quality Hacker news, reddit, Twitter, Mastodon, Github, etc. clients.

All these with clearly marked tracking/advertising where present at all.

This idea that F-droid apps are garbage largely stems from the time when Firefox was the only open source browser available. Objectively speaking, Firefox for Android is terrible. Newer open source Android apps like Chromium and NewPipe are actually in many ways superior to their respective Google Play counterparts, Chrome and YouTube.

To be fair Firefox for Andorid has gotten a lot better lately as well.

well Firefox is slowest browser around plus have no pull down to refresh, K9 doesn't have exchange

in general FOSS apps have horrible design/UI

AOSP works great on Nexus devices with zero modifications, the only real exception being apps that require location and apps where the developers chose to require having gApps installed. Get an AOSP Nexus and install the latest build of Chromium and you'll actually be using a more advanced browser than someone with gApps running stock Chrome. Nexus blobs are proprietary, but they're not missing.

I imagine the market sector that cares and actually understands the issues is not too small in itself but in the scope of potential users of smartphones quite tiny.

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