Sailfish Can Officially Be Installed To Android Devices

jones_supa writes "Talouselämä Magazine met Jolla CEO Tomi Pienimäki and asked a puzzling question. If Jolla truly is compatible with Android devices, is Jolla going to let individual users to install the Sailfish operating system on the Android devices that they already have? Pienimäki answers: 'That is the plan. We are on device business and OS business. It is fairly easy to install the OS on Android devices'. He says that especially in China, changing firmwares is a mainstream thing. About half of the smartphone buyers are upgrading their older or cheaper devices with a better version of Android. Therefore, Jolla's plan is to get some Sailfish installations sneaked in, too."

Comments

Interesting.

[MrEricSir]

So this means both Sailfish and Ubuntu Phone can be installed on Android devices. This is an interesting development -- perhaps we're moving toward a PC-like standard for phone and tablet hardware?

Re:Interesting.

[mwvdlee]

perhaps we're moving toward a PC-like standard for phone and tablet hardware?

Well; most Android devices have a bootloader you'll have to hack and void warranty if you do so.... yes!

Re:Interesting.

[substance2003]

I believe such a phone already exists.

http://oppostyle.com/find-5/8-find-5-white.html#/capacity-16gb

Re:Interesting.

[AvitarX]

What company?

T-Mobile has consistently given me a new phone on the spot if I have a box and one under warranty that's broken.

Re:Interesting.

[hydrofix]

Interesting. It's slightly better hardware than Jolla for €100 less. But at least for now without Sailfish OS, of course.

Re:Interesting.

[suy]

As I understand it, that is not going to happen if you want Google's bless (i.e. their applications and Google Play Services, which are critical for some applications to work). Read Google’s iron grip on Android, especially page 3.

Since the Kindle OS counts as an incompatible version of Android, no major OEM is allowed to produce the Kindle Fire for Amazon. So when Amazon goes shopping for a manufacturer for its next tablet, it has to immediately cross Acer, Asus, Dell, Foxconn, Fujitsu, HTC, Huawei, Kyocera, Lenovo, LG, Motorola, NEC, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, Toshiba, and ZTE off the list. Currently, Amazon contracts Kindle manufacturing out to Quanta Computer, a company primarily known for making laptops. Amazon probably doesn't have many other choices.

Seems like a terrible move against market freedom. Even worse for consumer freedom.

Re:LOL!!!

[Ol Olsoc]

Can it be officially installed up my anus?

What are you going to talk out of then?

What's Jolla? What's Sailfish?

[wonkey_monkey]

Talouselämä Magazine met Jolla CEO Tomi Pienimäki and asked a puzzling question. If Jolla truly is compatible with Android devices, is Jolla going to let individual users to install the Sailfish operating system on the Android devices that they already have?

That certainly is a puzzling question if you have absolutely no idea what Jolla and Sailfish are.

Go ahead, rant and rave all you want and ask me how I dare to read Slashdot if I don't know what they are already, but would it kill you just to give a hint of what Jolla and Sailfish are? At least then I'd have some idea whether the article might fall within my interest without having to research it. That is what a summary is meant to be for, isn't it?

And it can be done so easily without looking like you've dumbed it down - they do it all the time proper news sites.

Re:What's Jolla? What's Sailfish?

[Jiro]

Generally, the detail which is important to the reader is what distinguishes the referenced item from other things like it. It is uninformative for a Slashdot article to name a disease, type of food, operating system, or anything else without saying what it is. Just the fact that the reader can figure out that it is a disease, food, or operating system doesn't make the article informative. It's possible to figure out something from almost any article, no matter how poorly written. It's still poorly written.

Re:What's Jolla? What's Sailfish?

[foobar bazbot]

... I am constantly amazed by how hard people here work to ghetto-ize themselves -- just like the so-called "Linux community".

Here's a hint: If you want to maintain the security of being a fringe player with no responsibility that everyone else laughs at, then keep up your lazy, selfish ways. If you want to be a major player, then clean up your act.

Right now, I have a free OS that does what I need it do, and that I can tinker with whenever I feel like it. And I've got plenty of choice -- i presently use Arch, but I've used (and could go back to) netbsd and slackware, and I could go pick up gentoo, debian, etc. if arch stopped updating, or decided to go in a direction I don't like.

What do I get out of making the "Linux community" a "major player"? At best, those things stay the same when it becomes "a major player" -- in fact, it's liable to become worse, because of the need to cater to the lowest common denominator (cf. Ubuntu).

You say lots of other people (who I don't care about) would start using Linux? OK, then maybe they should wish Linux community becomes "major player" (in reality, they should probably just use OS X -- all the same UNIXiness, a nice polished layer of user-friendliness, and neither them nor we of the Linux community need to get on one another's nerves!), but you're not preaching to them, you're preaching to me, and I just don't care what OS they use.

You say the increased market share would force manufacturers to provide hardware drivers? Well, that might actually be a good argument -- particularly if there were some reason to suppose this doesn't just mean more buggy binary-only drivers. (If this argument was sound, wouldn't we see lots of good from the "success" of Linux by way of Android in getting usable hardware drivers? No, we've got a ton of binary junk, and dozens of separately-maintained hardware-specific forks.) And the only times in the past decade I've run into this hardware-support problem that Linux supposedly has were 5 years ago when I had trouble with a USB-attached webcam in a laptop, and 3 years ago when I made the mistake of getting a UMPC with GMA500/Poulsbo graphics because I skipped the research, thinking Intel graphics==good support. I'm sure there's a lot of unsupported hardware out there, I'm just not running into it very often, and when I do, I don't see any evidence that being a "major player" would actually make it any better.

And I'm just not insecure enough to need the validation of knowing I'm a Major Player, or to care that "everyone else laughs at [us]" (And I note that's the one argument you could be arsed to actually make... good lord, man, see a shrink!) -- unless there's some real benefit to me, I don't see a reason to expend effort helping people who don't care enough to help themselves.

Re:What's Jolla? What's Sailfish?

[wonkey_monkey]

It's not like you could search it or Google on a separate browser tab, anyway, right?

It's not like I should have to, if Slashdot wants to be a news site which informs its readership. Call me lazy if you wish, but I prefer to be less mystified after reading the news.

Re:What's Jolla? What's Sailfish?

[trackedvehicle]

It's pronounced yol-lah. "Jolla" means dinghy in Finnish.

Re:So Sailfish / Jolla supports all baseband chips

[foobar bazbot]

It will support Android apps.

Think of how desktop linuxen can support Windows apps using WINE -- they mostly won't be mistaken for native apps, some won't run, some will have odd glitches, some will run just fine. (I'm not saying that the proportion of apps in each of those categories will be anything like WINE, merely that there's bound to be some of each type.)

If the Android app support is good enough, it could make a huge difference in uptake -- after all, if anyone who can flash a custom ROM can flash Sailfish instead, then install all the apps they had under Android, then carry on like nothing's changed, it won't take much UI improvement/novelty to get a bunch of geeks to do just that, thus boosting their install base well above the number of handsets Jolla sells themselves. That larger install base makes development of Sailfish-native apps more attractive, which means more native apps, which means more reason to switch from Android to Sailfish.

Of course, if the Android app support isn't good enough, people will flash back to android because only half their apps work, Sailfish won't have the big install base, so you'll never get the native apps to replace all those borked android apps, and the whole thing collapses in a heap of fail.