Sailfish OS Gains Two-Way Android Compatibility

DeviceGuru writes "Jolla announced (PDF) that its Sailfish OS is now fully compatible with Android, letting the Linux-based mobile OS run Android apps, as well as operate on hardware configured for Android. This makes the MeeGo-based Sailfish OS the first alternative mobile Linux OS to achieve the feat. Jolla also announced that a second batch of pre-orders for its Sailfish-based Jolla phones will open later this week, after having sold out its first batch in August."

Comments

Shame

[Therad]

It is a shame this will never be mainstream.

Re:Shame

[Teun]

And what is on a world scale relevant about a single market?

Besides, what stops you from doing like the Rest Of the World and buying your own phone?
Between the first Motorola I bought nearly 20 years ago and my present Nexus 4 I've never had one with a contract.

Re:Shame

[GNious]

this is why they focused on chinese market - soon to be bigger than US market.

Re:Shame

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Besides, what stops you from doing like the Rest Of the World and buying your own phone?

I've noticed that US folks tend to think that you can only get a phone from a carrier . . . and just assume that the whole world also works like it does in the US.

Re:Shame

[Eunuchswear]

I presume the relevant issue is that no US carriers will support it?

I don't understand.

Why does a carrier need to "support" a phone?

Once upon a time, in a previous century, you had to rent your phone from the "phone company", but those days are long behind us.

Re:Shame

[cbope]

In the US, almost NOBODY buys mobile phones off-contract. Yes, most of us know that is the worst way to buy a mobile phone, but the simple fact is most Americans don't want to pay up-front for the phone. The average US consumer will not do the math and figure out how much more they are paying on-contract, not to mention that US mobile call and data rates are among the highest in the world. I've been trying to convince my parents in the US, who are in their 70's and retired, to get phones off-contract, but they just don't get it. All they see is the bigger up-front cost. It's a cultural thing, Americans tend to want their stuff now and with no starting cost, even if it costs them more over time. I see this both in the consumer and business worlds.

Carrier lock-in via contracts and locked devices is still a big issue in the US, unlike many other parts of the world.

Disclaimer: I'm an ex-pat American living abroad for 12 years.

Re:Shame

[Carewolf]

The phone will not be available in US not matter if the carriers want it or not. Jolla has right from the start said they would avoid the US due to the software patent situation there.

Re:Shame

[evilviper]

In the US, almost NOBODY buys mobile phones off-contract.

That's absolute nonsense. It's a minority for sure, but a VERY significant one.

Sprint alone has 16 million pre-paid (Boost/Virgin) customers, which means they ALL bought their own cell phones. That's just #3 Sprint, and doesn't even include their dozens of MVNOs like Ting, Republic, etc. And of course that doesn't cover any of their contract customers who may have purchased their own phone.

T-Mobile has switched to entirely pre-paid, so ALL their 35 million customers either did, or in the future will need to, buy their own phones.

NET10/TracFone seems to have about 22 million prepaid subscribers... All purchased their cell phones.

A couple years ago when I checked last, AT&T and Verizon had about 10% of their customers as prepaid users. That's at least another 20+ million people buying their own phones or tablets.

So your "almost NOBODY" consists of AT LEAST 90 million people, about 1/3rd of the entire US population... I sure wish I had "almost no money..."

Re: Shame

[RavenLrD20k]

Let's see. Buy a $600 phone subsidized down to $100, and pay the carrier for the cheapest plan at about $80/month ($50/mo + federal fees & taxes) for two years. $2020 total cost.

Now we buy that same phone on Ebay for a steal at $400, and put it on the same carrier, same plan which costs the same because they charge for the subsidy anyway and since the subsidy is not a line item, there's no way for them to reduce the bill (still $80/month) over the same time period of 2 years: $2320 total cost.

Wow... I saved -$300 by buying the phone outright!...wait.

Re: Shame

[h4rr4r]

Or use the same carrier and use a prepaid MVNO. If you are going to be stupid it will not save you money.

no thanks

[frovingslosh]

They can call it "fully compatible" all they want. The real issue is that, unless devices that use it as their OS also have the Google Play Store app, then the experience will always be second class or worse. I've had devices that run real Android, but only get apps through alternative app sources like Slide or Getjar. This makes the experience awful or even dangerous. I don't see it likely that hardware running Sailfish OS will have access to the official Google play store, not when so many devices that run real Android don't. So this belongs more on a site of "news for chumps" than on a site for "news for nerds".

Re:no thanks

[Teun]

I don't care one cent about the Android compatibility, I want an Open Linux phone, a device that'll run things like Thunderbird. or Kmail and doesn't make me an entry in Google's or MS database for exploitation.

Re:no thanks

[ChristW]

..or, as mentioned below, http://neo900.org/

Re:no thanks

[petman]

Google Play Store is just another Android app. The only reason that some Android phones don't have it is because the manufacturers choose not to put it on them, but Play Store is able to run on any phone running Android. Is there any technical reason why you can't install Google Play Store on Sailfish OS?

Re:no thanks

[EmperorArthur]

Google Play Store is just another Android app. The only reason that some Android phones don't have it is because the manufacturers choose not to put it on them, but Play Store is able to run on any phone running Android. Is there any technical reason why you can't install Google Play Store on Sailfish OS?

No, just legal ones. Though the play store has so many permissions you might as well grant Google, and by extension the NSA, root access when you install the thing.

Copyright means Google can set whatever terms they want when it comes to companies installing or people using the play store.

Re:no thanks

[mwvdlee]

Manufacturers need to pay Google a fee for Play Store. It is just an app, which they could install, and it would work fine, showing all the apps.
It's just that the store would see the device as incompatible with every single app in the store, so you couldn't actually use it to install anything.

Re:no thanks

[cbope]

No, this belongs on a "news for nerds" site. If you are so dependent and coddled by the whole app-store experience, then you are not a nerd and you need to use that other news site you mentioned.

A real nerd/geek/whatever label you want to use is not going to be bothered that he/she can't get their apps through a single source.

Re:no thanks

[Madoc]

f-droid.org is an alternative to Google Play that's full of open source Android software, pre-built from the source. It's like the debian of the Android world.

I use it on all of my devices, both those with Google Play and those without.

They announced this in a PDF?

[cripkd]

If only HTML would support the text tag...

Re:They announced this in a PDF?

[Njovich]

What are you doing on Slashdot? We don't read articles here. I find the fact that you are asking this very disturbing.

For Nokia it is a tiny market

[dbIII]

No, Elop is what killed nearly Nokia but it's not quite dead yet. Just last quarter they sold 53 million phones in China using the Sybian system that Elop tried to bury and halted all development on. Even hamstrung they sold more phones in a single market than Apple did in the entire world (new Apple record of 31 million phones in one quarter).
Now do you get some idea of why people are taking the Nokia takeover so seriously? A company that has been utterly gutted in a blatant corporate raid is still selling more phones than Apple despite people being told by the CEO of the company selling them that the platform is doomed.

Re:For Nokia it is a tiny market

[Eunuchswear]

No, Elop is what killed nearly Nokia but it's not quite dead yet. Just last quarter they sold 53 million phones in China using the Sybian system.

Uh, not Sybian

You mean Symbian.

Re:For Nokia it is a tiny market

[dbIII]

I would have bought a Nokia device in an instant if it was able to run Android apps and it was Nokia-level functional.

An earlier version of the Android compatibility layer they are using was run on a Nokia N900 and probably would have run on an N9 as well.
So the thing was already there and all Nokia had to do is buy the rights to use it.

I should elaborate in case people are confused - Jolla didn't do that specific part of the software themselves but are licensing it from another company which has been working on this for almost as long as Android has been available. There was a previous Slashdot article about it. Since it's commercial software only available to hardware vendors it's probably slipped under most readers radar.

Re:or was Replicant the first OS to do that?

[Stormwatch]

Replicant is a fork of Android that replaces the proprietary parts with free ones, so that's by design; Sailfish is a different operating system, so it has to use a translation layer.

The only way

[thegarbz]

You may not care but for the most part people care about the ecosystem not the OS itself. If these OSes have any hope of getting off the ground they either need to attract a humongous number of developers or support the ecosystem of another established platform.

Otherwise you'll find yourself with a dream OS but no hardware which runs it.

Re:Why, isn't that just peachy

[ladoga]

meego is just as much linux based as android is. To me it amounts to changing the colour of the bikeshed a bit.

Oh, so Android now ships with GNU/busybox userland and X (or Wayland in case of Sailfish) out of the box?

T-Mobile or MVNO

[tepples]

since the subsidy is not a line item, there's no way for them to reduce the bill (still $80/month) over the same time period of 2 years

There are two ways around this: use T-Mobile, which makes the subsidy a line item, or use an MVNO such as Straight Talk or Virgin, which specialize in unsubsidized plans.

python?

[Kludge]

You seem to know alot about this device. Where did you get all this info?
I love the python phone/sms/gps libraries that I have in my N900/Maemo device. I don't suppose Sailfish still has that?

Antifeatures

[tepples]

f-droid.org is an alternative to Google Play that's full of open source Android software

By default, F-Droid hides any application that includes antifeatures. So how should one fund the development and maintenance of an open-source Android application, especially a game, without including antifeatures? The business models I've always been told about for open-source games are to make the code open-source but add advertisements (antifeature Ads), or do as Id Software does and make the code open-source but restrict the distribution of the meshes, textures, maps, audio, etc. on which it relies (antifeature NonFreeAdd).