An email sent to the Sailfish developer mailing list goes into some great detail on what to expect from Sailfish over the course of 2015. It looks like they’re planning to touch every part of the system.
2015 will see Sailfish OS evolve towards a display resolution and form factor independent operating system capable of running on a range of devices. It will also bring a renewed Sailfish UI. We plan to demo this evolution at the Mobile World Congress in March.
We have now started to work full speed on the new UI framework changes and are currently in the prototyping phase. Our main driver is to introduce changes that
- enhance user experience on both the phone and tablet
- strengthen the OS core
- simplify implementation for a better managed code base
The remainder of the long email lists a whole lot of changes the Sailfish team at Jolla plans to implement – from the lower levels all the way up to the user interface.
In addition, chairman and co-founder Antti Saarnio posted on the Jolla blog with more hints about the future of Sailfish, and one thing in particular stood out to me:
The Sailfish OS is still young, and needs more stability, better connectivity, and simplification to the user experience. The small Sailfish OS native app ecosystem needs its own program, which guides and supports app developers. The amount of applications is not important, rather the most important applications for people need to be native, and of high quality. Friends, Tweetian, Sailgrande, just to mention a few, are excellent proof points of the potential of native Sailfish OS applications.
This is very good news. Improving the operating system is one thing, but the quality and availability of native applications is another. I’m glad Jolla recognises this and seems to be taking steps to do something about it.
Unfortunately, the last thing developers are interested in is supporting yet another ecosystem.
This is dead in the water, no matter how good it gets.
Firefox OS, Tizen and Sailfish OS are all fighting for 0.6% share, worldwide.
http://www.idc.com/prodserv/smartphone-os-market-share.jsp
I fully agree.
0.6% share worldwide still accounts for a lot of money.
Even though almost nobody makes money on Android AppStore with its 80% market share?
Lots of money for the company selling the phones.
There are zillions of apps in the Play store, so it’s very hard to get noticed with yet another me-too app.
Nothing is frozen in stone. This market changes so fast, you have no time to blink.
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-02/27/jolla-and-sailfish-h…
I think you need to rethink.
Ubuntu Touch OS and Sailfish OS both run Android applications. You could put them in the camp of OEM custom Android branches. Yes the customisation is that they have a custom shell and run applications other than Just Android.
So claiming they are only fighting in the 0.6 market share is kinda wrong.
No, they run cripled Android versions, by not having access to Play Store, Google APIs or the NDK.
Apparently they have missed the memo how OS/2 borked by how well Windows 3.x was supported.
You can sideload playstore on it.
But again, some did not get the memo also….
Normal users don’t sideload applications.
Besides, sideloading won’t make the applications that make use of Google APIs or the NDK magically run.
When you speak about normal users, you also speak about the bazillion Chinese android that do not have access to playstore?
Besides, I was about sideloading the playstore, like everybody do with these Chinese android, not just the application…..
Yawn.
You still using this tired old argument?
This argument has been used by nay sayers since the 70s.
Every new technology has to start somewhere. Y’know what DOS/Windows was when it started out? Something without marketshare. Y’know how many users Google had when they started out? They looked at each other inbetween programming breaks. Y’know how many users Firefox had on its first release? Enough to bake a cake.
How about focusing on the potential rather than identifying the current climate. Market share can be grown by the right technology in any sector. It is called innovation. Maybe you don’t think Sailfish/Jolla are innovative? Well that’s a totally different argument to make.
charlieg,
The MS DOS market didn’t really start from nothing though, MS had something none of it’s competitors had, which was exclusive IBM bundling rights even before MS had an operating system to sell. I think if MS DOS had to succeed on it’s own merits, then we wouldn’t be talking about MS today any more than we talk about Tim Paterson. The IBM deal is what made MS special, the best business move Bill Gates ever made, and the worst one IBM ever made too. I don’t think it’s that controversial to say that MS DOS was technologically inferior to most other competing platforms, however since it was riding in the wake of a giant, MS sailed right past competitors.
Y’know what DOS/Windows was when it started out? Something without marketshare. Y’know how many users Google had when they started out? They looked at each other in between programming breaks. Y’know how many users Firefox had on its first release? Enough to bake a cake.
The reality is that all of the above were spectacularly successful when first released.
MSDOS – preloaded on all IBM PCs and many PC clones.
Google – hundreds of millions of users before Google was floated.
Firefox browser – a direct descendent of Netscape Navigator which had a staggering 96% market share at it’s peak.
Firefox is possibly the best analogy for Jolla and (IMHO) a weak example for your point.
Netscape Navigator USED to dominate in a previous life, but were reduced to irrelevance in the face of now-entrenched Internet Explorer before being revived by a different company under a new name, Mozilla Firefox.
Similarly, Nokia used to dominate smartphones before being reduced to irrelevance in the face of now-entrenched Android before being revived by a different company under a new name, Jolla Sailfish.
This certainly doesn’t mean that Jolla will enjoy the same remarkable success as Mozilla – that would be as improbable as a small non-profit kicking the monopolist’s butt – but it also makes Firefox a better example in favor of that possibility than against it, IMHO.
Don’t forget the iPhone. Apple had 0% marketshare in the mobile sector.
But it had Steve Jobs.
And yet every second person (at least in the States) had an iPod or an iTouch. So Apple did _not_ start from 0.
The “iPod touch” came out after the iPhone. Yes folks had iPods, however their “personal organiser” features were severely limited, and they were not really functionally comparable with the iPhone.
Grand-parent’s argument that Apple started from 0% in the mobile sector is essentially sound.
steve_s,
Savior’s point can’t be dismissed either, it’s the same facts but just a different matter of perspective. We might say MS built up IE’s market share from 0%, and in one way that’s true, however it glosses over the fact that microsoft’s other market strongholds where huge assets in building up IE’s marketshare. The same was clearly true for the iphone, albeit possibly to a lessor extent.
When talking about Jolla, they are continuing from where Nokia left off, so it’s not truly starting at 0% either. However, Nokia is a sinking boat (owing to Elop’s bad judgement and/or conflicts of interest) such that it doesn’t translate into upward momentum for Jolla. So they’re mostly on their own and don’t have a massively successful market share/cash cow/reputation/ecosystem/etc to build from. That makes a huge difference that mustn’t be overlooked.
The best chance for any small company to make it big is when the market is brand new and there isn’t much competition and swaths of the market are up for grabs. In saturated markets, its going to be incredibly difficult for small companies to take market share away from big companies with strong ecosystems. Mind you I’m not suggesting Jolla is incapable of delivering fine products, but it’s ecosystem is intrinsically weaker due to it’s tiny market share. This is a major disadvantage as Thom rightly points out.
Even if we want to overlook the advantages that established players have, there are artificial barriers to entry that we cannot overlook, things like patents. Patents can preclude a small player from entering the market entirely. Established entities, such as Apple and MS, can use their existing portfolios as offensive and defensive weapons in new markets, but new companies that have no patent assets are often prevented from entering the market at all, which is evident in the case of Jolla being conspicuously absent from pro-patent jurisdictions.
TLDR, “‘they’ started from 0% market share” is overlooking lots of significant details.
People forget industry consolidation.
On the desktop, there’s only three players.
On the phone, there’s only three player.
The early days of anyone-can-win is long over. Deal with it.
Apple didn’t face competition when it launched its smartphone. Jolla faces a lot of competition.
That is certainly true. I don’t think Jolla wants to become market leader. It’s a small company with a niche product, that can certainly survive in a still growing market and solve a need for a certain audience.
That same ol’ same ol’…..
“iphone doesn’t had any competitior on arrival”
Not only there was ONE, symbian, not only TWO, windows mobile, BUT THREE!!! Yes, there were also blackberry.
After that, everyone said “google had no competitors”
Yeah, symbian were still BIGGER than iphone, and blackberry was still there…..
Edited 2015-01-19 18:08 UTC
I don’t understand the ‘but what about all the competition!?’ people.
Look at the rise and fall of Nokia. They didn’t innovate for too long (mostly Symbian’s touch interface was non-existent, when everyone suddenly thought that a slab was the ‘hip’ thing to have.)
This could just as easily happen to Apple or Google. All the phones are just big flat slabs now, remember when the flip phones first came out and everyone wanted one? Phones unfortunately are very much tied to trends.
I even see a ‘retro’ fad coming back where people want flip phones again. Hell, phones had also done the process of getting smaller and smaller, and now they’re trying to get bigger again, where everyone has some sort of 5.x” display.
Jolla has a chance, mainly because the user experience is seriously miles ahead of android. One-handed use is a big seller for people. I absolutely love my Nokia N9, and the only reason I got a Note 3 is because I wanted to do some drawing with a stylus.
Jolla probably has more chance to actually come in big than Blackberry does at this point. With rumors that Samsung is just going to buy them for their patents. I also find BB10 a much nicer phone OS than Android. Android just seems like it was slapped together with duct tape, and that’s after playing with Lollipop even.
There was plenty of competition in smartphones when Apple launched the iPhone. There were devices from Sony, Palm, Blackberry, and Nokia, and LG had launched the multi-touch Prada.
The iPhone was technically less capable than many/most of the incumbent devices when it launched, and also more expensive. What made it succeed above all the competition was usability.
The market was of course much smaller than it is now – Jolla faces much more competition than Apple did.
steve_s,
Yes. It was still very early in the mobile revolution since most consumers did not have a smart phone and broadband mobile infrastructure was just starting to become viable. I think an important element to the iphone’s success was that apple managed to negotiated unlimited data plans in exchange for making iphones exclusive to AT&T. They were lucky to get that deal, since AT&T wasn’t keen on it.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/04/att-randall-stephenson/?_r…
The unlimited data plan kind of made the iphone a no-brainer. Users could consume services on the iphone which would have to be metered (at ludicrous pricing) on competing devices.
I do wish them luck, never the less.
Edited 2015-01-20 22:19 UTC
The last thing true developers need it total stagnation. Progress won’t wait for such developers. They’ll just wake up one day to realize that they belong to the past.
Edited 2015-01-19 00:36 UTC
I think the phone OS maker that allows for there OS to be installed on any or most any hardware by the end user will eventually gain a large share of the market. What I don’t think most people fail to understand is the phone hardware is mostly a commodity. It will become just as the PC hardware. The two companies that lead the market in that independent direct will change the game.
Normal people don’t change the operating system of their appliances, they change the appliances.
I will add that if you, trying to help them, dare to change the OS they will complain.
For mine most vicious regressed friends/family, and after I try to setup locked environments and teach them to follow simple rules, I do side installs to help fix things when they really get borked. Working wonders on these pathological critters.
Is it just me that sees “evolve towards a display resolution and form factor independent operating system” and thinks WTF?
If they’re not already (at least at the OS level) display resolution and form factor independent then what the hell were they doing going to market?
I can understand launching with some apps bundled in the OS not being properly optimised for different form factors, but having an OS that can run at different resolutions is a fundamental.
If there are Sailfish users around, how would you rate the OS in its current state for day-to-day use?
– calendar sync (preferably with google calendar – CalDAV)
– contacts sync (with gmail – is that via CardDAV?)
– calling, texting, some web surfing