Jolla Phone News: Sailfish OS for Android Devices | Hacker News Reader

Jolla Phone News: Sailfish OS for Android Devices

reviewjolla.blogspot.de

56 pointsbergie24 comments

  Sailfish OS experience [...] launc[h]er application which can 
  be used to simulate the Sailfish OS experience on Android devices

What's the point for a custom launcher?

And on Wikipedia:

  On 16 September 2013, Jolla has announced that its Sailfish OS 
  is now compatible with Android applications and hardware.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailfish_OS

It would help a lot if Sailfish OS/Tizen would support Android device drivers, all of them are Linux after all, and the major issue are closed source device drivers that prevent more wide spread adoption...

that's not how it works. android device drivers aren't even compatible through android releases. i'm talking 4.0-4.1 4.1-4.2 etc.

they could be if we would have access to the binary blobs they link against, but we don't. asking for binary compatibility in device drivers across linux distributions is not really a trivial think to ask for.

Somehow a lot of core libraries manage to be major version binary compatible, through things like pimpl. I don't see why device drivers couldn't as well, I think it is a sound compromise.

They are showing off work (to Android users) to generate interest in their own products, to hopefully help sell those down the line. Which is exactly what they should be doing.

The major issue preventing adoption is not anything about drivers. That's silly. People buy phones with the relevant drivers included. Purchases drive adoption. The major issue is they aren't selling a lot of phones. Giving top priority to people who want to put arbitrary OSes on arbitrary hardware is not going to build viable business. Jolla should focus on selling their phones. They will need to do that successfully in order for us to possibly see anything new or useful come out of Sailfish, let alone make any progress against the boring, limiting "iPhone and Android forever" status quo.

Having a new Jolla phone, it's OK... however after calling a couple of people last night by accident, I think any actions that might disturb someone (calling, or playing music) - should not be activated by just a drag.

Settings -> Apps -> Phone -> Deselect the optino "Quick Call"

If you have the latest update you should have that option as it was one of the fixes/features included.

And yes I also had that problem initially but after changing this all was fine for me in this case.

Being a early adopters and having an OS with a beta tag we should dissect the changelog when it is available and know all the fixed stuff.

If people are going to say that is not for them or that they want a phone to simply work then they are clearly missing the point of being an early adopter of this kind of phone (a beta OS).

Of course after declaring that it is stable and pushing if for the mass consumer then this kind of stuff should be all fixed.

Relevant changelog of the last update: https://together.jolla.com/question/21786/release-notes-soft...

But I could be totally be missing the point you are trying to make. I answering to the specific problem of randomly calling other people when the phone was for example in the pocket :)

Seems to me that they're going to be doing an OS/2 - if it can run Android code, that'll be all people will ever write for it, and adoption of it itself won't happen.

I'm not so sure. There are a lot of people out there that _really_ dislike Java.

There are also a lot of people out there that _really_ dislike learning a whole new platform and API with all its foibles, quirks, bugs/misfeatures, and caveats. Especially when the platform is this new and so will likely change a lot for at least the first year.

But Sailfish OS should not require too much learning for developers with Qt experience, right?

For me personally, that is what has put it on my "interesting"-radar. I know that Qt has served me well in the past and that I have some grasp on developing with it, so the potential barrier I have to jump here is low.

I guess Qt is better than starting from scratch; maybe it won't be as empty as my first reaction was to assume.

Keep in mind that this ain't your daddy's Qt. QML is the new thing and it has a slight learning curve. (And the documentation is unfortunately lacking in some parts, like C++ integration.)

QML has the lowest learning curve of any visual programming model I've ever used, and that includes using the gui creators for visual studio and friends.

Something as simple as

  Window { Text {text: "Hello World!";anchors.centerIn: parent;}}

gives you a first class desktop Window with text in it. And most of the complexity only comes in when you start adding state and transitions.

And on top of all that the entire thing is 3d accelerated, so it is always hugely efficient.

That's why everyone is still using J2ME.

There are also a lot of people that _really_ like Java.

Considering the amount of apps / devs that Android has gathered, I'm going to go out on a limb and say the amount of developers that either like or are neutral about Java is far larger than the amount that "really dislike" it. If Android's programming language of choice was going to sink it, it would have happened when it was still a fledgling mobile OS, not years later after it was fully entrenched.

That is true, and I don't question the success of Android. However, there are IMO enough people out there who want something different, so that Sailfish OS won't become a close-to-no-app system.

You absolutely do not have to write your Android apps in Java. You DO need a thin bootstrap layer of Java, but with the amount of Android resources out there you don't have to write this yourself. You could make the next popular Android app and never have to touch a line of Java.

The NDK allows you to write apps in C/C++. And most other popular languages have a way to interface with C, you can use them as well. I've seen Android apps written in Python, Lua, and C#.

Also with things like Phonegap you can use Javascript if you so desire.

You seem to be implying that the reason OS/2 lost to Windows is its Windows compatibility, but that implies that OS/2 could plausibly have won without compatibility and that's a dodgy proposition.

I doubt it would ever have won, but the interoperability was (perhaps ironically) one of the nails in the coffin.

And more recently - Blackberry! That sadly didn't help RIM or adoption of Blackberry.

I lost track of Sailfish several months ago... are they any better than Android when it comes to privacy and security? Is it feature-rich (some call that "bloated")? What about those Chinese investors?

Yes, no, and I don't know, respectively

>> are they any better than Android when it comes to privacy and security?

Privacy +1: the company behind Sailfish OS (Jolla) doesn't generate its revenue through ads.

Privacy/Security -1: Sailfish OS currently doesn't have any real privacy/security framework, other than POSIX file permissions. But they're working on it.

>> Is it feature-rich (some call that "bloated")?

The Sailfish OS ships with a good set of features. It really does leverage a whole range of technologies from the Linux/FOSS ecosystem: Linux kernel, glibc, Qt, Wayland, Pulseaudio, Connman (think NetworkManager), oFono. There are still some important features that are missing (e.g. LTE, MMS, Wifi tethering, Caldav -- but all of them are being worked on).

>> What about those Chinese investors?

What about them? What's your question? :)

>What about them? What's your question? :)

Well, do they intend to do something like Huawei, i.e. bug the devices? My trust for some countries (US included) has been suffering a bit as of late. Otherwise thanks for the answers. (for some reason paragraphs I see when writing (or editing) a post aren't carrying over to the post itself :(

Reply on news.ycombinator.com