A little more than six months ago I bought a Jolla Phone to replace my Android Phone. I had the feeling that Sailfish OS would become really cool. The fact that it is programmed with C++ and Qt really resonates with me. It makes so much more sense to use that on a resource constrained device than Java. The gesture based interface sounded much better than three buttons in the bottom hogging screen estate.

I also really liked that all the software should be free. The fact that I can keep all my data to myself is something that also like. This is supported by the built-in CalDAV client or the native XMPP client. It sounded like pure awesomeness.

You guys get huge credit from me for having the guts to start a new mobile operating system in a market dominated by giants. As a software developer myself I realize how much hard work goes into a product like this. I also bought the Jolla phone to support you in the further development as I think that competition is healthy in a market run by US software giants.

From the beginning I was aware that Sailfish OS is in development. I expected to see some rough edges. However, I found more rough edges than I expected. Therefore I have to admit that I now returned to Android.

I do like free and open software. I'd like to improve it. Trying it out was a fair chance I hope. So now I want to tell you what (in sum) made me choose a different platform such that you have more user input and can improve your platform. I am willing to return to the Sailfish OS ecosystem one day. I would like to give you this list as a user account after six months in honor of the integration of the community in the development. Please do not feel insulted, I hope that this criticism is constructive.

The bad parts

No widgets

There are no widgets for the home screen. The overview of notifications has the weather and the appointments for the day. The calender cannot be customized. On Android I usually have the calender widget on the home screen to see the appointments for the upcoming days as well.

That way I do not forget that somebody's birthday is coming up or that I have to go to the dentist tomorrow.

Google Play Services are missing

Sure, that was pretty much the point of the whole thing. I wanted to get away from Google and keep my data to myself. However, one of the main selling points for Sailfish OS is that you can still run your Android apps. So basically this is a migration at a speed that I find acceptible. I can start with all my Android apps and replace them with Sailfish OS apps whenever I feel like it.

The problem is that some Android apps need the Google Play Services. That is what makes Android a non-free platform as a whole. It is just frustrating when apps like TextSecure cannot run because the Google Play Services are missing.

So the Android support comes with a catch.

Time zones in CalDAV

This bug has been reported multiple times and it still persisted with the latest version. Some appointments would be randomly shifted by an hour. This is not really handy for a calender. I started to use a workaround by adding the time to the title, but that is just a hack I do not want to do.

Chris Adams reached out to me personally here on TJC and asked me to gather some debug information. He looked into the information I gave him which is something completely unlike any Android manufacturer would do! Unfortunately there is no fix yet, I believe.

https://together.jolla.com/question/104127/caldav-broken-showing-only-dates-of-appointments-no-content/

New calenders do not appear

When I added a new calender in ownCloud, it would appear in Kontact (KDE calender). It would not appear on the Jolla, though. I had to delete the CalDAV account and re-add it. That meant copying my passwords with the QR code on the device again.

I do not add calenders on a daily basis, but it annoyed me a couple times already.

Vibration cannot be controlled sensibly

One of my previous phones was a Sony Ericsson W810i feature phone. It was a rather nice phone around 2006. The vibration had three modes:

• Always
• Only when silent
• Never

The problem is that I want my phone to be silent and no-vibrate on the night stand at night. During the day I want it to have loud and no-vibrate. On the go, I'd like to have silent and vibrate. There is no way to do this easily since the phone only supports two modes.

Android had the three distinct modes, I was pretty happy. You can just cycle trough them with the volume keys.

The Jolla also has this coupling with the additional option of “only when loud”. This is deep in the settings and not something that I want to change three times a day.

Email program and sent emails

I use the inbox-zero strategy where everything in the inbox is not done until it is sorted away in some other folder. To track emails where I need an answer I store sent emails in the inbox as well. That way I get nice conversations in one folder.

Thunderbird, KMail and K-9 Mail on Android support to change the folder for sent messages. The native client on Sailfish OS does not allow to change the folder. It just stores the emails in some folder that was somehow named. This is not really handy for me.

No extentions in browser

Although the browser is based on Firefox Nightly, it does not support add-ons. I'd like to use a content blocker and the sync to get my bookmarks across.

Android apps from dubious sources

On Google Android it is agreed upon that one should only install apps from the Play Store. Since there is no Play Store on the Jolla (for good reasons, I realize that), you have to get the apps from other stores like F-Droid or Aptoide.

The problem then is that I have to manually care about the updates like a Tamagotchi. There is no way to judge the trustworthiness of the apps. Out of curiosity I wanted to install Firefox to use sync and add-ons. Which one is a serious one?

Notifications from Android

The Android apps are integrated well but seem to have some issues. I happened to start using WhatsApp a couple weeks ago. Their notifications get shown. When I tap on the notification, only sometimes the app opens. I have not detected the pattern with that.

WPA2-Enterprise without a certificate

My university uses Eduroam which is a WPA2-Enterprise wireless network. I log in with my university ID and password which will also allows me to get my email and sign up for exams.

There is no native support for this type of wireless. In the Open Repos there is Roamer which adds some support for that. It has two catches, though:

• The password is stored in plain text somewhere in the internal memory. It is probably safe with a screen lock I guess.

• The certificate is not checked. This is horrible as now everyone could just set up a rouge hotspot and obtain my university ID. A vector like this is open as long as wireless is enabled, which is always in my case.

In the last weeks I changed the password and started to use 4G at my university.

Certificates cannot be added easily

My friend's server has a free CAcert certificate as we do not see the point in buying a canonical certificate. I wanted to add that to my Jolla to use CalDAV over a secure connection. It was a rather hard journey which involved the developer mode, SSH and some parts I never wanted to learn about PKI and OpenSSL file formats.

Android just has a GUI for that.

No quick settings

Modern Android and modern iOS has a quick settings panel which can be swiped in. In principle this should fit in the swipe-from-above menu in the Sailfish OS 2.0 interface.

The thing I would use it most for would be locking the rotation. This is something I would have to dig out from the settings. Usually I just have shifted my body such that I would not need the rotation lock.

Notifications on the lock screen

Showing the content of notifications on the lock screen pretty much defeats two-factor authentication. I can see the codes that I get sent via email or text message when I look on the phone in the right moment.

Android allows to show the notifications without the content which is what I am using right now.

No swipe in the keyboard

The keyboard itself is nice, and I do like the split layout with the suggestions in the middle. The lack of a swipe like input mechanism makes typing just slower than I now experience on a modern Android phone.

Android seems to be more free

Please correct me if I am wrong here. As far as I have understood so far the mobile handsets depend on the mercy of the hardware manufacturer to bake the drivers into the Linux kernel (and violate GPL that way). On top of that, Android Open Source Project can be installed on every device. I had plain CyanogenMod without any Google service running on my tablet for a while. It works, it is just a little frugal. Therefore I depict it as an ellipse. It does not have sharp edges, it just is not a round experience.

Then the proprietary Google Mobile Services are added to it to extend it in lots of directions. Then it is a full user experience.

Sailfish OS however seems to be sliced horizontally in the software stack. The bottom part is free software, the top UI layer is proprietary. That way you cannot install Sailfish OS on any device you want at the moment.

I realize that this is needed such that Jolla can make some money and gain some traction in the market. I am fine with that. It just feels a little weird to call it completely free.

Only tethering with WLAN

The Jolla only supports tethering with WLAN which will drain the battery. The Android phones since at least 4.0 support it via the USB cable. That will let me switch off wireless on both laptop and the phone.

Apps on SD-Card

So far I have only seen that apps get installed on the internal storage. 16 GB is plenty for my uses. However, having the SD card only use it for big files seems like a waste. On some versions of Android it is at least possible to move some apps to the SD-Card.

No payments in the store

As I use I do not mind that there are only free apps in the store. Since there is no native ad library there is no way that developers can easily make profit from their apps. I assume that will keep some developers from starting to write native apps for Sailfish OS.

Notifications are over the app

On Android 4 the notifications were just in the title bar and did not interrupt anything. I really liked that. Android 5 now has them overlapping but you can swipe them away and get back to your app. On Sailfish OS they overlap over your app and you cannot remove them. Touching them will open the app which is usually not what I want.

Home screen rather pointless now

The home screen shows the apps as tiles. As an app switcher this as a nice thing in version 1. The sorting was “last used” which is great as the latest apps are always on top. This is what the Android app switcher also does.

With version 2 the apps are now sorted with “started first”. This should give more determinism. However, when I want to get back to the app I just left, I have to search the home screen for the app. Manually sorting the apps on the home screen seems like a waste of time as I have to turn off the phone at every exam in university.

Therefore I started to use the app drawer to move between apps. Some apps have the tendency to start at their first screen when started from the app drawer which is not really what I want either.

Data quota counter without automatic reset

There is a data quota counter in the settings that tells me how much data I have used over WLAN and 4G. This is nice. It does not help me much as my plan resets the quota every month and I have to reset that manually. Android even lets one set the day in the month where this reset has to happen.

LED cannot be controlled

You cannot really control the LED from within the UI. At night, I do not want my phone to blink on the night stand. I could turn it face-down but then the vibration would scratch the display or so. I ended up digging into the configuration files of the ngfd and restart the phone to apply the changes. It would be possible with a systemctl --user command to restart ngfd, but that is hardly feasible to do three times a day.

Space after auto completion

When one accepts the auto completion, it will insert a space. If that was the last word in a sentence, one has to manually erase the space to insert punctuation. Android does this more intelligently, there I never had to manually erase a space.

Google sync logs out

Due to the error in the CalDAV backend I tried to use the Google synchronization. It seemed to work better at first, but then logged itself out for some reason. I would receive a notification that an accounts needs to be signed in. That is not really nice to work with, either.

Snooze cannot be disabled quickly

When I get woken up in the morning, I usually activate the snooze as a safety net for the rare case that I fall asleep again. When I actually got up, I need to deactivate the snooze. This requires me to find the clock app, deactivate the alarm and activate it again.

Alarm is not shown in full on the lock screen

When an alarm is set, there is an icon in the status bar. It does not tell you when the next alarm will be. I once set an alarm for work days. Then I wanted to use that on a Saturday as well. When I went to bed, I saw the alarm clock icon and thought it was alright. After I randomly woke up too late I realized that the next alarm would be Monday morning.

Android shows the alarm together with the time and weekday. That way I can quickly assure myself that the alarm is for the correct time.

Screenshot needs an external app

There is no quick way to take a screenshot. You have to use an app which sets a timer. Then you go back to the app you want to take a screenshot of wait for the timer.

Android usually has the Power + Volume Down combination.

The good parts

Frequent updates

The updates are my major grief with the Android ecosystem. It is so fragmented and software updates basically only happen with hardware upgrades. The update policy of Jolla really resonates with me and I really like it.

I now bought a cheap device and will just buy a new one in a couple of years. That is still cheaper than buying a Google Nexus device. It is very sad for the environment but perversely cheaper for my pocket.

Linux package management

When I saw that Sailfish OS is basically an RPM distribution, it made me smile bright. I installed Python and then used Ansible, the server configuration management software, on it. That is cool!

SSH Server

Enabling an SSH server is straightforward and just works. I can even change the hostname to my liking.

No stagefright exploit

The handling of the stagefright exploit is a farce for Android and it illustrates the fragmentation of the market very well. Most handsets are not included in updates any more. And there are other vulnerabilities that Google does not fix for Android 4.3 or below. I have an Android 4.0.4 device that I will throw away partly because it feels like running Windows XP today.

Double tap to wake up

The double tab is pretty nice. That way one does not even have to pick it up when it lies on the table.

Alarm clock works with dead battery

The battery died on me because I forgot to charge. The next morning the alarm still went off. I was really amazed that there was enough battery capacity planned in to let the alarm go off.

My previous Android phone silently drained the battery because it could not find reception. Then the next morning it did not have any more juice to wake me up.

Community inclusion

An Android, you are just one anonymous user among millions (billions already?). Here with Together there is a way to talk to other users and official developers. This is really great!

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These are the things that noticed with the Jolla phone in the last six months that I have used it. Together those things drove me into buying a new Android phone which has roughly the specs of the Jolla phone as I really like the screen size of it. Hope to see you again soon!