More native apps - Jolla should support developers

I think Jolla is trying to get other vendors to use Sailfish OS. The OS is their main product, not the phone, and getting Sailfish on a wider scope of devices is essential to their survival. Only that, together with paid apps support in the Jolla store, can get the ecosystem rolling on its own.

Or maybe Jolla could explore niches such as https://blackphone.ch/privat-os/. From the comments I read on here from MWC Sailfish 2.0 gets a lot of kudos but can it reach the critical mass of iOS and Android? I wouldn't want SailfishOS to be confined to a "cheap phone" market as Samsung appears to be doing with Tizen. Paying for some halo apps may be the way to go in order to attract consumers and devs but wouldn't be sustainable in the long term. To target a niche like enterprise would be perhaps interesting but the tablet would be better for it I think.

Sadly this is a cursed circle.

In order to get companies to invest in sailfish native apps, you need to convince them there's a big enough client base there, that they would miss out on if they don't. But getting enough users to use your platform implies you already have the apps they need.

Alas most important apps for normal users are not something you can have developed by any dev. High quality native facebook/twitter/whatsapp etc. imply the company behind those has to invest time and money into creating an actual company backed native Sailfish client. It seems none of them will ever consider giving a straight forward public API for anyone else to use, as that would dig into their ad revenue, since they won't have complete control over the client apps. That's why third party solutions for these usually work good, but still strongly lack some aspects of the company's own apps.

Ideologically speaking it would be much better to fight for open standards and well written public APIs that would allow people to build their own clients for all platforms. That sounds a lot more like the "People Powered" ideology that Jolla want to stand for. Sadly this is painfully incoherent with the way big business like to work, they fear giving control to their users. That is a fight that will probably take decades to win, if at all.

Companies also like to push foraward their own design ideas and not take into account ecosystem standards. Take a look at the myriad of apps that strive for the same look and feel on both android and iOS, which is a retard move, since both platforms have their own different UI paradigms. I fear an official skype/facebook/twitter sailfish app would suffer the same issue, raping sillica to make it look either iOS-y or Android-ish.

Hi, I appreciate and agree with what you say, mostly. Apart from the vicious circle. I think you can avoid it just by pushing and investing in an initial set of apps - mainly general FOSS ones that are already available and need little to no work to be ported: browsers, VPN clients, players, etc. The other wave should be single-dev apps, as I said, for example all those available (till not long ago) on N9 - hundreds of apps that can be also easily ported, in most cases. But Jolla needs to spend some (little) money to support the devs. When you get some critical mass of minimum apps, users start flowing in and big vendors start to be interested.

Single devs can be supported by the community. There are already a few people doing crowdfunding for their sailfish development, so they can drop work and/or get a dev-only device and do sailfish apps like a full-time thing. And it seems to work. Coderus comes to mind, but there are several such cases.

This might be a future thing though. For now the intel deal seems like a big thing. And maybe after they secure a good enough integration between software and nice beefy hardware underneath it, they'll have some time and money to invest in pitching to big players in the app market, to get them to roll at least some support.

It was really sad how the Rovio deal only ended with a shiny pink TOH, instead of a sweet native game, on the level of Angry Birds, I hope this doesn't repeat, although it's admitedly a bit better than nothing at all.