Post by @britter@chaos.social
Received my @jolla phone today. After first excitment about the build quality of the device the frustration started... š§µ
@jolla in the packaging there is a cardboard cover on top of the phone, that talk about privacy and this is your phone.
However, when you first boot, it immediately asks you to create a Jolla account to get access to the Jolla app store, which apparently is required to get Sailfish OS updates.
Why do I need to create an account in order to get OS updates?!
@jolla okay, let's ignore that for now. This means I can't use the build in app store. How do I install apps? Apperently there's something called OpenRepo. Okay, lets go there. Can I install apps now? No, you first need to install Storeman.
@jolla so I try to install storeman, which indicates it was successful, but the app icon never shows up anywhere. So I can't open the store. How to debug this? Use the file browser to open the install log. To bad that I don't seem to have a file browser and I can't install one.
Very disappointing first use experience. I wanted a phone that feels more like Linux. Instead I get the same app store BS again that drove me away from Apple and to some extend GrapheneOS.
@jolla but if I end up installing android apps through the android app support, I might as well upgrade to a Pixel 10 and continue using @GrapheneOS...
@britter SailfishOS is a massive downgrade for privacy and security from the Android Open Source Project even without the GrapheneOS improvements. It doesn't provide decent patches and combines the insecurity of both desktop operating systems with a low-end Android device without proper updates. It also has much worse usability, app compatibilitiy and battery life.
Unlike the Android Open Source Project which is open source, SailfishOS has largely closed source code for the high level OS code.
@britter GrapheneOS and AOSP are Linux distributions too. Linux isn't glibc, systemd, Bash, coreutils and Wayland. Many Linux distributions use a different libc, init, shell, command-line utilities and graphics layer if they even have one at all. Android having massive adoption and high usability doesn't mean it isn't Linux. Linux dominates mobile already.
SailfishOS doesn't use a typical desktop Linux software stack anyway but rather their own largely closed source UI and application layer.
@britter There's a flagship device from Motorola with official support for GrapheneOS coming soon if you don't want to buy another Pixel. It will be a higher end alternative to the Pixel 10 Pro XL. Pixels will remain the budget option for quite a while, especially since the 'a' series devices have the same 7 years of updates and security features as the high end device. It will take more time before Motorola devices below an ultra high end flagship meet all of our security requirements.
@GrapheneOS I was looking into Jolla / Sailfish OS because to me it feels like Google is slowly closing down Android. I know a lot of the things only apply to Google Android, such as developer verification. But I wonder if at some point the high ups decide it's not worth continuing to support AOSP. And what that would mean for Graphene.
@britter SailfishOS is already largely closed source for the code specific to it and would be a far worse starting point than hard forking AOSP even if it wasn't. There are a lot of stakeholders in open source AOSP and it would be able to continue without Google. The fact that they haven't closed it is why it hasn't been split away by a group of organizations working on it together. Multiple organizations have made hard forks with varying degrees of success but there wasn't much reason to do it.