And I always feel like a fool for believing them. Oh my, how I want to believe them. I still find myself late at night, checking their web page for any new models.
I use Sailfish OS, it has always been able to run Android apps on top of an unmodified Linux Kernel.
As I havenât installed Google Play Services Iâm restricted on what I can do though.
Are Jolla still going?
Iâm not involved with the project, I think some key people left a while ago.
This came out a while ago Jolla C - Jolla
Also I think some people have ported SailfishOS to the Fairphone 2
â How to install Sailfish OS alpha on the FP2 - Guides - Fairphone Community Forum
It is worth mentioning that Sailfish is not 100% open source; there are binary blobs in the GUI I think.
That said it is running Wayland which works like a charm. 
The elephant in the room here is that Google must stop Android from fragmenting while geeks like fragmenting things. 
Ubuntu Phone was a bad design IMHO because it didnât have a Wine emulator for itâs phones.
At least Sailfish does (Android apps can run on it), the question is do we want to play cat and mouse with Google the same way we did with Miocrosoft 10 years ago? Or are we cool with being locked into Googleâs proprietery services.
(Google Play Services is a binary blob too).
I.e. do we want to help fragment Linux on the phone (Samsung and Amazon would like to as well but for other reasons). Or just be a user?
I doubt you will find anything that is 100% open source if you mean entirely free software. The baseband is likely to be closed source.
A wine emulator for phones? Why would that matter? People donât run Windows software on their phones and even if wine did run, it wouldnât be for a mobile phone factor. Can you elaborate?
I agree, although what do you mean âbasebandâ, I donât know that term?
I was kinda using that as an analogy, Wine allowed running contemporary software (which at that time was Windows) on Linux.
My point was that it would be helpful to have something like that for a Linux Phone, a way to run contemporary apps (Android) on a Linux Phone.
The baseband is the device that manages radios on a phone and is typically powered by a closed source driver (potentially due to federal/government restrictions). See:
I am in two minds about this.
On one hand, I totally agree. There is a huge library of Android software out there that immediately adds value to a new phone platform. Users want the games, and apps like Uber, Lyft, Skype, etc.
On the other hand, (a) those apps will potentially run inconsistently on the device due to the apps looking and operating differently to the base platform, and (b) the business is always at risk of Google killing the ability for them to run those apps, so opens up a significant risk vector.
This is the catch 22 situation. We want the dynamic catalogue of apps, but we are supporting a closed ecosystem. This is one of the major reasons why other phone platforms (e.g. Ubuntu and Sailfish) have struggled.
Windows Phone / Windows Mobile people do.
⌠and wine wonât run such applications, so thatâs not a useful retort, I think
Well, the preferred alternative is âwe want to build a separate ecosystem which works and doesnât rely on reverse-engineering and the whim of a competitorâ, and we have utterly failed to do so. Sailfish therefore gave up by becoming an Android skin (if people only buy your phone because it runs Android apps, then you might as well run an Android phone, especially when half the Android apps and half the Android features donât work), and Ubuntu gave up by just not being good enough as an OS to attract a significant number of developers. Tizen⌠is still struggling along, and are bribing developers to build apps for their platform, but are an interesting counterpoint here: the top ten Tizen apps and games include WhatsApp, Facebook, FB Messenger, Temple Run 2, and Candy Crunch so they are at least in the same sort of position as Microsoft when it comes to âhaving some name brand apps supportedâ.
Ahhh, a prediction episode, always epic 
Too bad Bryan left, always brings colour to whatever he does. Why linux sucks was the reason I ended up here, but I stayed here for all of you guys so I hope youâll keep up the quality this year.
And finally season 2, hype 
1 Like
Sadly, I think this is the case. This leaves us in a worrying condition: what needs to happen for someone to create a viable alternative? Is it pure money to fund it, relationships, or something else?
We are definitely going to do our best to keep fans of the show who enjoyed Bryan to keep listening. Of course, let us know what you think and how we can keep improving.
First episode of the new season had me giggling in the elevator coming to work this morning; youâre doing it right. Not going to remove Okay Voltage from my feeds any time soon.
2 Likes
Nice!