zlacker

What is Jolla now? I remember it as startup created by previous Nokia employees that tried to build a Nokia-type of phone based on Maemo? Or do I remember it wrong?

>>mongol+(OP)
In 2013 they released the Jolla 1, a phone with custom hardware and Linux software. In 2015 they tried again with a tablet, but it failed on the side of hardware production and the company became insolvent.

In 2017 there came investors, among others ROS Telecom, a Russion telecom provider. They pivoted to only providing software, mainly on Sony phones. That is still ongoing.

Since the Russia - Ukraine war the Russion investors went MIA. The Finnish people from Jolla started a new company and had all assets moved to that company. They are now trying to rebuild the company and apparently extend into hardware again, even though the PCB design is off the shelf.

I have been a user since 2014 and am quite happy with their offering. It offers ssh root access if you want. Optionally manually installing software. Very much a GNU/Linux experience. Privacy focused and user oriented. And now slowly but surely there are parts of the software being opensourced.

>>mongol+(OP)
No, you're right. SailfishOS inherits the core of the OS from the old Maemo of Nokia N900 fame (though the UI was built from scratch I believe). I tried it back in the day on my Nexus 4 and it was buttery smooth, even with all its fancy animations and gesture-based navigation, which was way ahead of Android at the time.

I always thought SailfishOS would really take off by now, given how advanced and polished it already was at the time, but Jolla's mismanagement nearly jeopardised the whole thing (they filed for bankruptcy last year).

>>d3Xt3r+pd
They filled for bankruptcy again last year (first was the Tablet debacle in I think 2015) but have since managed to survive it again, so all is well. :)

>>d3Xt3r+pd
The platform always suffered from two big architectural missteps.

1 - the native browser being an old firefox/gecko fork embedded into their own UI framework, giving a poor performance and dated compatibility quirks 2 - the android emulating runtime meant that you get again, dated , poorly performing android apps, that you're driven towards because the browser engine was so poor.

these two mean you basically end up with a sub-standard android handset/UI, and a tiny market for native app development (because everyone made do with android), its a real chicken/egg.

In fairness I've not used it since the sony XPeria days, but it was my daily phone for 3-4 years since the Jolla 1. It was cool being able to emacs and irc natively on the phone, but that was limited in use cases tbh.

>>colins+5o
Same experience here, though from Sailfish OS run on their first Jolla phone.

Also permission model on Sailfish was much worse than on Android. I didn't use Android apps on Sailfish, though.

I really liked Silica UI, but available apps had much less functionality than their counterparts on Android and iOS. I think that open sourcing Sailfish and Silica would end up better for them.

Nevertheless, I kinda liked the phone, but ultimately went back to Android.

>>colins+5o
The Firefox engine legacy goes back to the Maemo times - its not ideal, but what else would you use ? The web engine situation is quite bleak even on desktop Linux distros and its even worse on mobile Linux.