The Sailfish X survey from Jolla

All tracking options of the Survey Monkey app have been explicitly disabled so that the survey is 100% anonymous.

Well, a company tries to survive... so it's not an illegitimate idea, imho. I once bought a license, bought also an Xperia X - and I'm stuck now. Any new interesting devices, officially supported? Nope. I came to terms with the annoying bugs and try not to brick the thing... but how can Jolla make money now?

So, Jolla, take notice of the bugs, support the manifold of community ports by adding android (for money, of course), promise me not to sell my data to anyone and protect me against ads and scam, and I'll be happy to pay yearly for the service. But having just disadvantages by using an exotic OS and additionally paying for the downsides is too hard. There must be an outstanding benefit worth to pay.

Jolla needs licensees but those should obviously not be the end users but rather hardware manufacturers.

I don't think some people here understand how much it costs to develop an OS. The 50€ license fee doesn't even cover salary for 1 hour for a developer in western Europe. There is no way Jolla can provide even close to all features android/iOS provide based on the small number of licenses bought.

@decon oh do you have data about how many licences were sold?

@decon Right, why then not to charge customers €100 monthly indeed. After all it's they who want an alternative OS, not us (Jolla) who want to disseminate it (this is sarcasm btw). You know, if the only solution to keep your business on the flow in a situation of a constantly decreasing customers base is to take more money from the core of few loyal customers, then your business model is just flawed. Or, perhaps, you simply have no development strategy because this is a way to nowhere.

I remember a question about that so for me it was possible to answer. Just checked again:

 8. Would you accept a recurring payment if the Sailfish X licence includes transferring to other supported devices?

and:

9. Would you prefer a monthly or annually recurring fee for Sailfish X licence?

well then instead of 0 put 10000000 in. Thats virtually the same since it is obviously not serious:)

@Filip sure and I answered those. But still the fact tensions that even those who answered "won't pay a monthly fee" will (or can) be counted as "will pay amount x". I'm 100% sure it'll be presented that way internally.

@inte That is not a smart move. Another interpretation for such an answer is that you're happy to pay any amount you will be charged. Mind the fact that if the final decision is made on some aggregate of the answers, such a silly answer will push the mean of the distribution towards the right end, making an impression that on average customers are fine with paying higher price.

I think the yearly fee of about 50 euros is very reasonable and stated so.

So you would prefer to receive broken updates released in a rush to avoid missing on payments? That's a strange choice :)

I believe that Jolla team is not that greedy and stupid. Pretty sure they realize that the will lost lot of users that way very quickly.

Actually pay for updates (except for bugfixes) would not be the worst idea.

That could end up with Jolla issueing updates in smaller bites to create more revenue.

To prevent that there could be two releases. The LTS where you don't have to pay a fee but are a period of time behind the most recent version(e.g. 6months) and the current release, where you don't have to wait for the new features. Or they sell a premium subscription, which is bundled with other stuff like protonmail.

"PostmarketOS, Librem, Nemo mobile"

non of those OSes is ready to be a daily driver OS.

That's true, no one said these projects are more developed than SailfishOS. It is only alternative for me, that means, If Sailfish OS will in near future follow fate of BB OS 10, I hope, in near future, one of these projects will be ready for daily use ... (btw, I forgot NecunoOS, sorry)

see this is the only real reason id pay too. and perhaps apps could be sold the same way.

That was also my thought initially, but on second thought I don't see it working well: if SFOS was 100% free and open source, this payment would be essentially a Patreon and no one would pay it anymore. :) Unfortunately, at this stage to survive they need to keep some proprietary bits. I am fine with it being the Android support and predictive text input, though.

well, i joined the sailfish train originally in 2014 BECAUSE of the promise of FLOSS. what good does it do to give jolla money and when they go bankrupt in a couple of years and the whole software is lost because its not open source. i want the work jolla does to stay eve nafter jolla is gone and that only works with FLOSS.

Can only agree on every point! IT STILL IS BETA!!! and that is sad!

I did not even got an email, so I cant really judge, only about the fact I am also here from day 1 with jolla and SFOS its simply said RUDE AND DISRESPECTFUL towards us fans , customers and supporters. NICE WAY to communicate, NOT!

I can confirm it. What kind of statistics is it?

surveymonkey free tier has some limitations.pn how many answers.you can get iirc

The way how this works for example for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (which is actually fully open source BTW) is that you can no longer access the repositories (so no more updates) and contact support once you leave your subscription to lapse. And I can imagine the same model working for Sailfish OS as well & it is actually already in place for the trial (which AFAIK was not getting updates & was unsupported).

I would pay an one time fee for an upgrade of android version for Xperia X.

The vast majority of the sailfishos users need the android support. That is a fact and clearly aknowledged by Sami Pienimäki at the Sailfish 3 Day (video minute 18:20 -18:50): "run the apps we want on the platform we love" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65Ob80PRT3c . So i do not see any time soon the Jolla Store filled with most popular native apps.

I had a similar concern when no reoccurring fee materialized after the initial payment for my Xperia X license, as without reocuring payment, Jolla really has no concrete incentive to support older devices (even if new kernels and drivers are available from Sony) as less people will be buying those over time & paying the one time payment. This is basically reverting to the Android way of device manufacturers also not having an incentive to support you once they have you money and I think we can do better.

With a reoccurring subscription payment, there is a concrete incentive to keep older devices up to date (including kernel updated, driver updates, android layer updates, fixing as many device specific bugs and regressions as possible) as long as enough people are still using them & paying you a subscription. I would certainly not mind such a subscription as long as Jolla does their part. :)