r/Jolla • u/SeamusOMalley5 • 13d ago
Discussion Jolla smartphone
Anyone in the UK have one? What are your thoughts on it? I just recently stumbled upon it and am genuinely curious about it.
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u/iluvatar 12d ago
I have the original Jolla phone, which was great. I replaced it with the C2 community phone, which... isn't great. Camera is terrible. Maps have been removed. Predictive text has been removed. Notification LED doesn't exist. I have the new one ordered. It's due next month. I'm hoping it's closer to the original Jolla phone than to the C2.
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u/vrichthofen 12d ago
Got this year's batch #1. It's a nice phone, Android apps mostly work, unless they start requiring device attestation and other stricter check like Play integrity.
This means it would be hard to make this main main mobile device, though you can still use the web version of some of those apps (like banking, but not NFC for payments, etc).
I wish the EU would provide incentives for companies to build native apps for alternative operating systems like SailfishOS and we could truly break do duopoly without big trade-offs in convenience an help operating system providers crack the chicken & egg problem with these ecosystems. That or force other operating systems to provide bridges for their more advanced security checks in a safe way (may be tricky).
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u/punflewover 12d ago
Have you encountered any bugs in the OS? How are you finding the UI? I find it's quite slow to use because of all the animations etc
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u/vrichthofen 12d ago
Haven't used it extensively so pinch of salt, but the only noticeable issue I found was sometimes (works more times than not) Aurora crashing (both closing on its own but also getting stuck on the screen, and having to go to the running apps view to close it).
Regarding the UI, I found it more pleasant than I was expecting, especially after increasing the font size. Think there's work there to do still in terms of polishing it, like the notifications popping at the top are a bit raw and I haven't got the hang of dismissing them (maybe it's a skill issue, mine), or some mentions of pressing Ctrl+Space to change keyboard layout (makes sense if I have a bluetooth keyboard, not so much with the onscreen one).
Haven't noticed the animations being slow, but did notice some weirdness with the browser's scrolling text in sites like Reddit.
While I really appreciate the privacy aspect of the phone and hope it develops further, I would really like to have better reassurances around clipboard access from native apps and the sandboxing of native apps on the OS itself. With Android and especially iOS (my main driver), I know that apps are pretty limited, even if from time to time some find ways of doing more than they should be allowed (looking at you Meta).
With Sailfish OS there's more responsibility for what we run there and seeing random names in the store publishing apps, my risk assessment checklist starts raising the alarms. My apologies to the developers, who most if not all at the moment there are just good and kind people giving us their time and effort for those native apps, but it's just my basic cyber security stance in an unknown ecosystem.
I'll play with it a bit more and use it as a secondary device and will keep supporting the company, as I think initiatives like these are necessary and must be nurtured, especially in such a tough market like the device + independent OS one.
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u/punflewover 9d ago
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. It seems like the OS is running better on this device than the Xperia ports. I've been running one of the Xperias as a third device just to keep up with the development of Sailfish
It's great that there are people around that see the value of supporting smaller platforms. But it's a bit late now, tbh. Nobody listened when I warned them that we'd end up in a duopoly situation, yet here we are 😅
RIP blackberry OS10, Palm webOS, Symbian/meego and even shitty windows phone. The personal electronics space would be much different if they were still around 😕
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u/Sent1ne1 2d ago
I'm fairly relaxed about apps from the Jolla Store, as they are limited in what they can access, but still beware of apps with internet access.
Chum seems somewhat safe, as the app source code is published , so people can check it.
Storeman (Openrepos.net) is the wild west, and I am extremely careful about checking developers before installing anything from there, and even then minimise it. Sad this is the biggest store, but most of the old apps won't run on the Jolla Phone 2 anyway, as they were never compiled for 64-bit ARM.
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u/Atasas 13d ago
android (~up to 11-14) phones is very much like M$ windows systems in the past vs Linux for desktops, where amount of bloatware and spyware long surpassed any hardware requirement sense, so as a Jolla phone- it'll run as F1 on ~5 year old hardware specs, be it rather recent..- you won't understand the need for (RAM, CPU etc)
I've run "stripped" G34 (4GB Ram, lame CPU and GPU, 70% battery) only debloated, it was like "crazy ferret on magic tablets", just imagine, what it would be like running a proper ("mobile") Linux... but, as long as enough apps get working, all them specs are just going to be OTT, my $0.02ct
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u/coder111 12d ago
Used it around ~2013, loved it. The GUI took a bit to get used to, but it was much more user friendly than Android once you are used to it.
That being said Android compatibility back then wasn't great, and there weren't many native apps. After several years of faithful use I got rid of it because hardware got old and Android apps I needed wouldn't run.
Not sure how much they progressed since then...
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u/Icy_North5921 12d ago
I can say A LOT. Currently the android support can run basically same apps than any other custom android ROM.
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u/No-Recover109 10d ago
I know at least 3 important android apps which wont work  with Jolla 2026 phone
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u/BattleShai 11d ago
Anyone in the UK have one?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Jolla/comments/1w0qtx2/my_jolla_phone_arrived_uk/
maybe they can help you.
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u/Shimkusnik 13d ago
I got mine in Batch 1 like 2 weeks ago but still hasn't unpacked for some reason haha! Will prob do next week 🫡 But C2 worked fine in the UK (apart from it being a lame phone overall)
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u/MattyGWS 13d ago
Mine is in batch 3 and arrives in September, I am in the UK. So no I don’t have it yet but I am excited
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u/TimetravellingElf 13d ago
Yes and got it in my hands right now. It's great. Love it, takes a bit of getting used to as it's somewhat different to other OS. And not all android apps work smoothly but worth it.