Sailfish is being made by a small company with not that many developers, which means there are rough edges compared to Apple and Google. They can spend many millions on their software. I am very happy with Sailfish updates though and also very happy with using it.
The only Android apps I use are Firefox in its last v68 incarnation, and also Whatsapp. I'm lucky not to be tied in too much with all kinds of services :) For many services there are native apps.
And yes, it is not fully open source, which is a pity. The current investor sees no business opportunity in that, but to be real, without that investor, Jolla and Sailfish would not exist anymore. They are mostly a B2B company now, B2C has commercially failed around 2015. I do hear sometimes that more people are using Sailfish, but I haven't seen real statistics. There is also the Nemo project, which started with reimplementing the closed bits in Sailfish, and later deviated somewhat. If Sailfish gets more succesful, that is always still an option to force their hand, but I do feel the time is not right. I do have to say that the Linux community can be very critical towards its own community, sometimes getting to be toxic.
I would be open for a Pinephone, but it is mostly regarded as a developer phone right now. I will wait for Pinephone2 and hope things improve to make it more a daily driver. The Librem 5 is priced out of my league, though I do admire what they are doing.
I just want my phone to stay out of my way, and not jumping up and down :)
Is this something they enforce, or can I bypass this with a VPN because they don't actually care but have to say that for legal/economic reasons?
In practice you just need to buy the license from a EU IP (so via VPN, europen VPS, etc.) and then you are good to go from anywhere in the world. This can be seen on these global stats for the Sailfish OS community software repository:
https://openrepos.net/statistics/global
Lots of traffic from outside the EU. Also I took my Sailfish OS device for a trip across Japan twice, and everything worked fine for me as well. :)
So in general I recommend getting a EU based VPN and then buying the Sailfish X license for the device of your choice (I would personally recommend xperia 10 II). If you succeed, then I would get the device, just in case. :)
It has a nice OLED screen (N9 vibe) and the on-screen keyboard makes it feel like typing on an N900; the camera works fine. I didn't install Android support so I am running pure SailfishOS.
The installation took longer for me, but that was because I decided to change the default rootfs and home LV ratio, which included shrinking the LUKS container home lives on, which was a bit stricky, but I was successful in the end. :) Definitely not something 99.9% users would need to do but its still cool its possible. :)
As for Android support, I've installed that and it seems to work fine for the Android apps I've tried so far. Its apparently even possible to install MicroG or even full Google Play Services, if you have apps that need it.
Agreed, its a bit of a compromise if you want to use a non Google/Apple device in the first place, but still given that the Android emulation layer effectively lives in an isolated container, which you can also turn off at any time, its already quite a bit less intrusive than on an actual Android phone where it effectively permeates everything on the device like mycelium.
Sailfish should open up their code fully, it would probably benefit them in the long rum
So oh well - at least we have something usable before some of the distros started on the PinePhone come off age. :)
Whenever they support new HW, it takes quite a while to stabilize. Not sure what is the situation right now. My guess would be the newest supported HW is getting obsolete already and nothing new has been announced.
Also, you can get the previously supported Xperia devices cheaply second hand. Just make sure it has an unlockable bootloader or else you won't be able to install Sailfish OS on it.
While they are still decent hardware that advice is useful only for purists that don't intend to use Android at all. As I wrote, you get only Android 4.4 on those devices.
The Xperia X is somewhat tricky in this regard. It uses the "old" way of Android support. Android 8 and 9 is supported with an LXC container. Bringing that to the Xperia X would mean reflashing. Then you end up in the situation where some users reflash, and some stay on the old flash-image. Which needs another choice; support both groups, or drop all users of the old 4.4 image.
I do understand the disappointment if you have an Xperia X and see all other devices get updated Android support. But Jolla here is between a rock and a hard place.
https://source.android.com/devices/architecture/kernel/core-... A 4.4 kernel would be required, but there is only 3.10.
https://developer.sony.com/develop/open-devices/get-started/...
So is it just one of those management decisions that we don't put any work into an old device? It annoys me mostly because the X is the last device of a reasonable size. I would not even pay for a new one because I am entitled to a new work phone. But I don't like the huge devices you get these days.
Still if you manly use native Sailfish OS apps, you will be getting all support and updates on Xperia X for years to come.
It's unfortunate but at least the newer devices should hopefully be in better shape. And as for size, Xperia10 II does not feel so much bigger than X as its the same width, just a bit longer. Feels quite subtleactually.