I have been using Saifish as my daily driver and only phone since 2014. I bought a Nokia N9 secondhand in 2013, but the battery was not great anymore and I could not use Whatsapp on it. The choice for Sailfish was then easy. For 5 years I used the Jolla 1, which has received updates from 2013 to 2020. Since 2019 I am on a Sony XA2. I bought it secondhand and after a commercial license for Android app support it still felt very affordable to me. I you would want to start now, the Sony Xperia 10II might be the best choice with Oled screen and Aarch64 support.
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.
To add something, I very much adore the Ambience system. I very much prefer a 100% white on black system, and Sailfish Ambiences can do just that. Some Android apps don't really follow, but they sometimes have a darkmode setting.
I just want my phone to stay out of my way, and not jumping up and down :)
It's totally artificial limitations, solely for buying the Sailfish X license. Likely due to support obligations and/or due to software patent situation outside of EU.
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:
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. :)
Thanks for sharing. I've been eyeing a fairphone 3+ for a while, and I remembered discussions around sailfish on the FP2, but it seems the FP3+ is not compatible. I'll have a look at the Sony Xperia.
For the FP2 and FP3 there are community ports. I think the FP3 port is in relatively good condition. Main drawback currently is that there is no Android layer available for community ports. There are plans at Jolla to bring Android support to community devices, but you can imagine that the expectations by users are hard to manage here :) Community ports are not supported by Jolla itself.
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.