Sailfish – An open source mobile OS
sailfishos.org
sailfishos.org
It's hard to see how yet another mobile OS will make traction. Perhaps the Android runtime will make it compatible enough that developer-types will use it.
Android is not perfect and was not always a popular thing and there is room for more than one mobile platform.
It is good to see another opensource OS step into the arena.
There is certainly things wrong with Android and iOS and I'm not saying that a new popular mobile OS is not possible but there are certainly a lot more challenges that need to be over come then even a couple years ago. I am pretty sure that Android and iOS v1 would not have been overly successful if they had been released into the mobile OS landscape that currently exists.
I think the Ubuntu phone will run regular Ubuntu apps and the Firefox OS treats web apps as first class citizens. Those two are leveraging pre-existing applications.
Aside from that, the only apps I use on my phone are the browser, google maps, and google voice. Who's to say the massive 3rd party application pool is even needed for an OS to really be successful? What if Sailfish just had very few really well-written and privacy-respecting apps that they sold for like $20?
Is this possible? of course, if its better it will win out. But this is definitely a hurdle that needs to be over come. Convincing people that they way they are use to is worse then an alternative is often a difficult task, especially for a device that pretty much never leaves someone's side. I even notice that people often have a lot of difficulty switching between Android and iOS if they have used one for a significant period of time, and most of the differences between these two platforms are fairly minimal.
Among the would-be competitors, the Jolla team is best equipped to mount a challenge.
I'm not surprised. Mobile OSs are faced with an enormous challenge, which is hardware support.
The PC platform (while there are variances) is relatively uniform environment compared to the current crop of SoCs (system on chip) used by phones and tablets. There is hardly any standardization on things like power management, security, and other on-chip peripherals.
Each port for an OS is a lot of effort, so only the most popular OSs (sometimes only one of them) is supported by the manufacturer of the SoC.
Tizen came from the Meego proper project, which was more Moblin than Maemo.
This is what happens when you let marketing... do anything.
May be some devs can get a hand on it
I have been looking for a mobile OS that adheres to the principal of least astonishment for a while now, but have come up short. I would pay money.
I'm kidding ofcourse. The real answer is, wait until they release some device that supports it!
Hopefully they'll be working towards having something releasable so people can start using it in the wild soon, it looks interesting but it's going to need many eyeballs on it before it's ready to play with the big boys.
IMHO, the Android APIs feel like Symbian rewritten in Java... I get the impression that Google has spent five years rushing to add new components to accomodate everything under the sun with no vision of how the stuff fits together, and meanwhile vendors do their own thing that is slightly incompatible with the core. Of course Symbian was worse in every respect, but the end product is worryingly similar.
Except less hardware requirements and better battery runtime :-)
There are also some hints that Sailfish is taking an approach similar to Ubuntu's for touch and GPU support on mobile devices and blending Wayland with Android's compositor.
In other words, Sailfish is likely to be closer to a mainstream interactive Linux OS, and a closer cousin to Ubuntu, Firefox OS, Tizen, etc. than is Android. It's different times now, and you don't have to diverge so much from the Linux mainstream to create a good touch user experience.
That's not correct. Android has multi-processing. The Android runtime enables Service components to run in the background, and has preemptive thread scheduling, and has had these features throughout all publicly released versions of Android.
Sometimes I want to do something else while I wait for a large web page to load over my mobile data connection. On my n900 this worked fine, but as soon as I switch to another task, Chrome on Android 4.2.2 quits loading the page.
Plus, task switching is still a heavy operation on Android - swapping back and forth between two applications is a bulky, slow operation compared to the n900, which, itself, was bulky and slow compared to a desktop window manager.
The problem with battery life and multitasking on N900 is that it has so little RAM that it gets super swappy and starts to thrash esp. under heavy client-side js. I'm dying for an N900 w/2013 specs.
>Apple could give us "real multi-tasking" at the flick of a software switch
This is not true. Task management has to be designed into a multitasking OS. Maemo did a beautiful job.
Some people just would prefer having desktop-like OS on their phones with some mobile oriented apps, and that's what Maemo/N900 almost delivered. If Sailfish is anywhere close to that experience then I'll be a happy hacker. Admittedly commercial (mainstream) success probably requires bit more, but on the other hand I know non-linuxy people who were/are quite satisfied with their N9/N900.