While Jolla doesn't promote this phone as something that is a 1:1 replacement for Android or iOS platforms, many of us (judging from SailfishOS forum threads), have hopes that if not yet, this will be the case very soon.
Is this real? Or is this only our wishful thinking?
I cannot answer this question with yes, or no, but after 4 days and 3 factory resets, I think I can give some insights on what I think and why.
What I want from a phone
I have many phones at home. Until now, I daily drives an iPhone 16, because "it just works". As an extra phone, for fiddling with stuff and using some features that are only possible on Android, I have a LineageOS installed on an old Xiaomi device.
I've also used to have a Fairphone 6 with Google's Android as a daily driver one year ago. Once day it just stopped working, had to factory reset it and then I came back to iOS.
For a daily driver I want something that "just works" and this is what Apple gives you.
Apple - "just works" for everyone. Self-hosters (Syncthing, Home Assistant, Immich fans) sometimes need to hack it around.
Android - "mostly works" for everyone, everyone need some level of hacking to make it either debloat or work as user wants it to work.
Now, Jolla comes on the stage with, what looks like mature SailfishOS, a linux phone. It should be good right?
What I expected from Jolla phone
When I purchased that phone I wanted to get a device that will run linux, that I can fiddle with, that will give me a lot of freedom when it comes to customisation and also, will be a fully functioning phone.
With a promise that with time and growing audience, more and more use cases will be covered by its native apps.
Product wise, I expect Jolla to give me functioning device, that "just works" when I don't hack it. So bluetooh, wifi, cellular, locking/unlocking. This should just work and I don't need to think about it.
What I did not expect
I did not expect a 1:1 replacement for Android or iOS in my life. I knew some Android apps won't work due to reasons, and I accepted that staying thankful for the Android compatibility layer that at least covers some, if not most of the cases already.
There are bugs though
It's not good. Just in the beggining I managed to stumble upon some bugs already. Feature wise, and stability wise, this is not a polished OS experience.
Let's go through some class of issues I noticed and that stayed in my mind.
Bluetooth
Bluetooth reminds me of 2010 linux desktops, where it was sometimes working, sometimes not, one had to restart some daemons or look at the sky weather the stars align in some special ways.
This has to improve fast because that's a major annoyance across all use cases.
Want to listen to music, using a native music player? Sure, sometimes you will be able to use headphones buttons to play/pause. Sometimes those will do nothing.
Want to unlock your car using BT key technology? Amazingly, Sailfish does support it, but in reality, every time I want to enter my car, I open the app, and see it ain't open, then after diabling and enabling bluetooth it magically opens.
Nuts.
Want to pair your Garmin watch while listening to music? Expect bluetooth crash completely. At least SFOS gives you some tools to restart that service. They ain't obvious where to find them though.
I don't really expect everything to be smooth when it comes to Android apps, but native apps, made by Jolla, should be flawless, polished and stable.
Bluetooth on a phone made by Jolla, with a system made by Jolla should be stable. It is not.
2.5G, 4G, 5G
Another instability and "it might work today" is a basic connectivity. Only some users are affected and nobody knows why. I've put all the details on SailfishOS forum, so here I will be short.
For 2 days I only got EDGE connectivity on my Telekom SIM card. I replaced the card (even thought it works fine on other phones), did some mumbo jumbo, including factory reset, always EDGE.
While the other card I have (Orange in roaming) had 4G with no problem. Same for Vodafone (5G). Telekom? Nope.
Then I just went to another city, noticed it gets 4G suddenly, and when I came back home it just stayed fixed. Even after reboot!
Why? No clue.
Never had something like this on any phone.
Again: phone made by Jolla, OS made by Jolla - my expectations are high here.
Crashes or freezes on native level
Many native apps like Settings, Camera sometimes crash or freeze. Those are things that are not really reproducible, so I can't even post a bug report. It just sometimes happens.
Those are minor issues though, easy to recover, I don't mind them in the first month of shipping stage.
UX Design
A good app, website or operating system should develop some design language, that also covers many different ways of doing the same action (which also touches accessibility).
On iOS I have at least 3 ways of pasting something from a clipboard:
- I can longpress on an input, it shows me contextual popup with "copy/paste" action.
- I can use a keyboard that has "paste" icon.
- Some say there's also pinch gesture, it never worked for me, but worth noting.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but on SailfishOS there's only one way: a clipboard icon in the keyboard.
On the stock keyboard it mostly works. On FUTO keyboard it only works for non-password inputs, which is a major PITA when stumbling on another missing UX workflow:
Password managers
Long time ago I made a divorce with Apple iCloud keychain and went full Keepass. I have one kdbx file and it works everywhere, on Linux (KeepassXC), Android (KeepassDX), macOS and iOS (Strongbox).
I use TOTP and Passkeys, they also work everywhere: on Linux with Keepass extension, on Android with native OS passkeys API, on macOS and iOS also with native passkeys API.
How is it on SailfishOS?
Here you can forget about Passkeys, but also about any sort of decent experience with any sort of login process.
I currently use two apps for Keepass, ownKeepass (native) and KeepassDX (Android). They are both kind of half-working with their own problems.
ownKeepass
This is abandonware so, you know, no expectations, but
- it doesn't offer database unlocking with fingerprint or phone PIN (is there even some SailfishOS concept for that?)
- it doesn't offer TOTP (or it doesn't work for me for some reason)
- passkeys topic is completety unknown for both Sailfish and for this app
- autofill in native apps? No, not even a concept of that in SailfishOS
KeepassDX
Here situation is slightly better
- it works with TOTP
- I can disable most of security features so it doesn't lock my database too often
- but it cannnot unlock with with a Fingerprint
- can only autofill (after providing a master password each time) on other Android apps
- can copy to system wide clipboard (which is then somewhat blocked by FUTO keyboard, so I have to switch to the stock one)
A defined user workflows for things like authenticating should be on a designers desk, there should be some review and iterations. Looking at the current state of SailfishOS it looks like it was never a topic.
UX state of the art
Overall features I consider "must haves" for any kind of OS these days, like automatic switching between light and dark theme/ambiente, reducing blue light in the evenings, you know, things that we all have on Fedora, Ubuntu, macOS, iOS, Android, everywhere are here missing.
This is in the "bugs" section, however I am completetly fine with not having them on that phone, given that so far SailfishOS was very very niche with not that many users.
I hope this will be improved in future iterations of the OS and we will soon get things like widgets (API?), up to date browser so the SailfishOS forum don't tell me I use outdated one, and maybe I could also arrange my app icons in a drawer with empty spaces between them (something that Android users used to point out as missing on iOS for years).
Community
If you think I become an enemy or hater of this product after reading so far, this is more or less what I felt 2 days ago. I was seriously considering sending it back as I thought this thing has no chance of getting any traction with such UX, missing features all over the place and even getting at least 4G on the most reliable and strongest mobile network in Germany.
But then the 4G problem was gone and I did another attempt, this time trying to do as much native as possible.
And this is where I changed my mind about sending it back and the whole Jolla experienced shifted from "lets try out this new kid on the block" to "I think I have some responsibilities here".
If it aint working, fix it
The moment I read this on SFOS forum something clicked:
I’ve already tried it, it’s unreliable, sometimes it connects, sometimes not, I ended up having to start the car from the phone because it wasn’t seeing my phone while I was in the car", that’s why I’m working on the native app.
And this is where I thought: this is just like Home Assistant community. HA itself is not very polished or feature rich, it's all the stuff people build that makes it so cool.
And then I tried all over again, this time with an aim of trying to find as many native apps for my use case as possible.
I didn't find all of them, like this passwords situation didn't improve, I still have to use both native Matrix client and ElementX because my server uses WebRTC for video calls, there is not a single Mastodon native client that works (really! if you're reading it, make one now!).
I did find a Whatsapp native client (which works fine and which I'm sure will need to change its name the moment Meta discovers it), Immich is almost feature complete, Music player works and there's even a really good replacement for iTunes Podcasts (Podcatcher).
I will try using this phone exclusively for a week now, and see what do I actually miss and whether I can live with just this phone (luckily my Garmin watch offers NFC payments).
I want it to succeed!
The other thing is, I absolutetly hate current situation with two big players, both from US, so technically we might get banned from using all of their products one day because someone said something during 10 minute tyrade and put some sanctions on someone without any normal reason.
GrapheneOS while looking interesting is still Android. They are more polished, better looking, because they are standing on top of a giant who made all of that.
And that's fine, but is it a true contestor of that duopoly?
Jolla promises here something more: true competitor, independent OS, FOSS with a strong community and optimism.
I wanrt this project to gain traction and this is why I'm going to keep using it, maybe I'll use some of my time to make that one app I'm missing so badly (Mastodon?), and maybe one day my wife could get something that reminds her beloved Lumia phone, but this time without a corporate that may kill that project because some charts and lines don't match.
Next year is crutial
In the next few months, there should be like 15.000 phones shipped to their buyers. Some if not most of those people are people hungry for something new, most of them geeks, most of them don't want this Apple/Google duopoly. We all want it.
With LLM coding assistants code became comodity. Now everyone who knows something about software development, can more or less comfortably develop an app in a previously unknown environment.
That means, from those 15.000 people, many will see something that they miss badly, or they already maintain some piece of software for Android/iOS or web, and they will decide to port it into SailfishOS.
I think, the success of this platform might happen very soon, if we take our IDEs and LLMs-of-choice, and just release stuff to Jolla, OpenRepos or Chum store.
When reading the forum I see every day a new app popping up. Sometimes it's a blatant vibe code that will probably go abandonware soon, sometimes it looks more promising. But things are moving there, already quite fast and we should expect only more people making more for everyone on the platform.
Forum, IRC, Matrix
Community talks on Forum, IRC, Matrix. There is no Jolla Phone group on Facebook. We are different and we might be setting a new trend if we all do our parts.
One of that parts is to use that phone and complain to whoever vendor blocks their app that you're not able to use it. Play dumb, say: I bought this phone, it's 100% legit from a EU vendor, why don't you let me use your service?
And if they play legal talking, find some good arguments, like for a polish ING branch who blocks the app, while their German counterpart is working on Jolla, but also on LineageOS with no secure boot.
2 decades ago Android was also a "phone for geeks", people were bragging about bluetooth scanners they did, that was impossible on "normal" phones back then. Now this vibe is here, and we need to embrace it.
Jolla responsibility
This is all possible, if the "master of ceremony", Jolly Boys, take their part serious too, and offer great support, ever greater and polished OS, UI and UX, including SDKs and tooling.
I can't judge how it is now, I see tons of missing pieces, but I'm optimistic and I will keep that phone even if the biggest unique selling point is that I can carry a device that connects to my Tailnet and offers an actual native Terminal, with an actual, native ssh so I can ssh to my servers while being abroad.
Let's hope this is the next big thing, made in Europe, with all the freedoms we say we value.
If you want to discuss this with me, please write me on Mastodon or find me on SailfishOS forum.