The headline improvement in this new version of Sailfish OS is a big upgrade tot he browser engine.
We’ve upgraded the browser engine to Gecko ESR52. This makes using the Sailfish OS browser already much more enjoyable! This isn’t the end of the story though, and is in fact just the first step of our plan to gradually upgrade the browser. As the browser is open source, some of you may have already noticed from the repositories that we are continuing to upgrade the engine for upcoming releases. Newer browser engine versions bring in thousands of bug fixes, improvements to the rendering and compatibility with various newer browser technologies.
On top of that, this release brings experimental Rust support, the first steps towards 64bit ARM support – about time, I would say – and support for multiple users on a single device.
These guys are still around? I shouldn’t be surprised, AmigaOS is still being developed after all…
At this point, any mobile operating system should find a way to become “Android-compatible”, with the ability to run the Play Services and Play Store apk’s from Google.
Jolla is developing Alien Dalvik an Android compatibility Layer for SailfishOS. You can manually also install Play Services if you desire to do this.
Still very much around, yep. It’s my everyday OS on my phone (Xperia XA2), and the supplied Android compatibility is excellent, if not 100%.
The biggest problem with that pesky Android-compatibility is it’s a frozen proprietary blob on an essentially rolling distro. You can install the latest Sailfish OS even on the Jolla1 but that Alien Dalvik layer is forever stuck at v4.1! (Hopefully it can be replaced with an open source alternative in the future)
There are lots of FOSS (or close) open source alternatives to the Android App store as usual and this is the problem. https://alternativeto.net/software/android-market/?license=opensource Commercial marketplaces cost 30% and give away freedom, but they also create winners who can have critical mass. The Linux Kernel itself is a notable exception. I wonder if this was due to a difference between Linus and Stallman and how they approached creating freedom.
lapx432,
I agree with your point, although it’s only a very tiny fraction of developers who have critical mass in the official app stores. It isn’t like most developers have the choice between having critical mass with 30% fees versus being remaining obscure with lower fees. Even in the official stores the majority of developers will struggle in the long tail.
Sometimes it’s better to be a big fish in small pond versus a tiny fish in a large ocean. Smaller stores can provide better opportunities for discoverability/exposure and higher standards. Obviously the store has a smaller marketshare, but you can have greater exposure to those users. Honestly think if owners weren’t blocked by apple from accessing 3rd party stores, I’m pretty sure we’d see more innovation on the multiplatform front to bridge the gaps between android and apple similar to how Steam is bridging the gab between PC platforms for gamers. Competing stores is something that both users and developers could benefit from, my hope is that one day owners will get the explicit right to go to alternative app stores without manufacturers blocking them. I don’t have faith that US congress will get it done, but maybe the EU?
It makes sense that a free unix clone on cheap commodity hardware would replace very expensive commercial unix deployments on enterprise hardware. The main question was which unix clone would win. For better or worse, the BSDs were in legal trouble at a critical moment in history allowing linux to get a head start.
It’s interesting that this hasn’t happened with windows, and I think one of the reasons is that cloning windows is far more difficult than cloning linux. Reactos is in perpetual alpha. Regarding DOS, there were clones coming out of the woodwork and many of the companies I’ve worked for were looking and using alternatives to MS DOS. I suspect microsoft would have eventually been marginalized had it not made DOS obsolete first.
I guess the lesson is if clones are starting to gain traction and you are a market leader, you probably want to migrate your customers to a new product before the clones take away your marketshare.
> Sometimes it’s better to be a big fish in small pond versus a tiny fish in a large ocean.
That’s not how apps work. You go where the crowd is, unless doing something super-obscure like developing RadeonHD drivers for AmigaOS 4.1
kurkosdr,
Actually it applies to apps too. Yes, the marketshare of a store matters, but it does not follow that you as a developer will get automatically get more exposure in a huge store, this is a flawed assumption. Say a small developer has an promotional budget of $15k, he will likely be outspent hundreds of times over by the big fish in a huge store such that most people will never even know who he is or see his work. It’s not enough for the crowds to be big if you don’t have a realistic way to get their attention. But in a smaller store it’s more realistic to stand out.
The point being a larger share of a small market can be more valuable than having a tiny share of a huge market. I’m not saying it always is, it obviously depends on specifics, but I stand by what I said before: “Sometimes it’s better to be a big fish in small pond versus a tiny fish in a large ocean.”.
Of course, this point is kind of mute if the alternative stores face major barriers to entry 🙁
Indeed. The best way to make money off a mobile application is to have a popular product which can support the app being a money pit.
You mean things like Xamarin which compile down to native packages for the particular platform?
Using tools from large vendors, like MS, who have vested interests in protecting particular platforms, in this case supporting iOS/iPadOS and Android, from competitors is a problem.
Also, IBM pushing Linux on x86 hardware to protect/promote AIX on POWER.
Companies have to be better then their competition in some form for fashion, and DOS wasn’t that special.
Early on, IBM dumped a bunch of money into Linux and anointed it the UNIX successor, but even with IBM backing Linux, the first .com wave of the late ’90s and early 2000s was powered by Solaris running on Sun hardware. Linux didn’t really reach critical mass until around RHEL 5.
More over, GNU/Linux filled a niche of being a SysV Unix-like OS with a group of ardent champions providing lots of free marketing due to it’s licensing, and the official SysV UNIX vendors weren’t doing much at this time. Eventually, Solaris was the only SysV UNIX OS which was considered under active development.
To loop this back to App Stores, Cydia filled a niche, and Apple and Google copied it. They didn’t put their head in the sand like the UNIX vendors did. If people would leave the App Stores en mass, Apple and Google would have to respond, but that’s not going to happen because the App Stores work well enough for most people.
Also, the App Store is just the tip of the iceberg. There is a boat load of Apple and Google specific infrastructure behind them that other Apps Store are going to have to replicate in order to be competitive.
It might be a hardware limitation of some sort. On the Xperia XA2, Alien Dalvik reports Android 8 compatibility.
And/Or Myriad wants more money for updating a 7 year old phone.
SailfishOS 3.4 in a video overview: https://youtu.be/tZkMxPpwII0
If you want to see it in action.
I think what Jolla did not promote so much is the new OpenGL ES 3 support that makes the stutters of the OS on long lists with images disappear. The system runs more fluid with this on Xperia devices that have issues with BGRA support and other graphics related things.
Also the Xperia 10 devices profit from a longer battery life thanks to the Wifi scanning fixes.
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