[MehdiEG]

For those who are wondering why this is up on the front page: Jolla is launching their first handset tonight in Helsinki: http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/jolla-sailfish-os-phone-...

I always wondered why Jolla is getting so little love from HN. To me and from a geek / hacker point of view, Jolla is an awful lot more interesting than Android.

Anyone who's had the chance to own a Meego device knows how incredibly talented and passionate the team behind Jolla is. I'm really looking forward to see how the OS and apps feel on Jolla. The OS also appears to be a lot more open and hackable than Android (although the proof will be in the pudding so we'll see how it all pans out).

[lambda]

Probably hasn't been getting much attention because so far it is vaporware (until you can actually buy a device, it's not all that interesting), and it's a member of the complicated Maemo/Moblin/Meego/Tizen/Mer/Sailfish family that keeps on promising great things but seems to be reinvented every year and never actually delivers a working or supported ecosystem. Yes, a few devices have been released in that family, but have been immediately EOLed (the N900, DOA as it was released just as Nokia decided to go Windows only) or sold only as specialized developer previews or whatnot.

This whole family has been promising lots of things for a long time, but never seems to actually deliver, while you can get an Android phone in any corner store.

I might get interested once I can actually buy a device and write an application for it. Until then, I'm going to be extremely skeptical of this whole family of devices since they seem to consistently over-promise and under-deliver.

[MehdiEG]

As far as I can see from a completely outsider perspective, the Maemo / Meego / Jolla team have always been severely under-resourced, have always been the underdog and have always deeply suffered from the political turmoil happening above their head while they were at Nokia.

One thing they have never been however is vaporware. They have always delivered. And what they've delivered, particularly with Meego, was superb. Meego was especially impressive given that in the last few months before its release, they had for all intent and purpose already been fired from Nokia. That they managed to pull together, keep working on it and release something of that caliber when they knew that Meego had no future at Nokia is pretty incredible.

It's obvious that Jolla is extremely unlikely to ever go mainstream. But that's not the point. They're clearly a team of talented, passionate and persistent hackers that can create products that manage to be delightful to use, open source and very hackable. That's why I find the lack of interest from the HN community, which is usually all over these type of projects, to be surprising.

[lambda]

So, you're right, it hasn't been entirely vaporware. The N800, N900 and N9 did ship, and were pretty impressive.

But when the N900 shipped with Maemo, they then announced that they were changing a large portion of the stack, from GTK to Qt, from dpkg to rpm, from Maemo to MeeGo. So the software stack was pretty much obsolete as soon as it shipped. Then the N9 was released after Nokia had cancelled development on MeeGo, so it was pretty unclear if the platform had any future at all.

Now it's been two more years, and I've heard a lot about Tizen and Mer and Sailfish and Plasma Active and so on, but I haven't actually seen any hardware running them that's generally available.

So yeah, it's pretty impressive what they've done with the resources they have, but I really don't want to invest time and money into a platform that's going to disappear or be reinvented in another year.

[dandrews]

The Maemo-MeeGo transition didn't simply replace technical innards; it completely disrupted the Maemo user community, which relationship was negligently bungled by Nokia management. (Although it may also have been due to Intel's influence via the Moblin contingent.) Weep for maemo.org, which once upon a time was the best friend Nokia ever had.

[Zigurd]

> As far as I can see from a completely outsider perspective, the Maemo / Meego / Jolla team have always been severely under-resourced

Compared with Tizen, FirefoxOS, or Ubuntu Touch, Jolla probably has a bigger and more experienced team.

Tizen has been career Siberia at Samsung, despite all the noise about how Samsung "wants to not depend on Android." Samsung even more wants all the money Android makes for them and are timid about pissing off Google. Samsung and Intel don't communicate well. Until Samsung finally killed their Symbian products (IIRC) about a year ago, more people were working on Symbian at Samsung than on Tizen. Why does Intel need a handset Linux of their own? Answer: they don't, and one day the CEO will notice.

Ubuntu Touch, like many initiatives at Ubuntu, seems tentative. The way Canonical tried to crowdfund a device makes it seem like they have no launch partners.

Firefox OS has a solid team behind it, but they are also dogmatic about it being a Web operating system. They would turn up their noses at having Android compatibility. What if the sweet spot for Web operating systems is Chromebooks? It was tried on handsets once already and failed.

[Shamanmuni]

Odd, I have a Nokia N9 with Meego in front of me, works perfectly and was cheaper than a similar Android phone. I'm completely aware of this family problems, but you can't say that it hasn't delivered.

The Jolla devs have promised a guide for installing Sailfish OS in this phone, so I will happily make the switch when they publish it.

We are in Hacker News, today you can't find a more hacker-friendly OS for your phone (well, maybe Firefox OS is on par, I haven't used it). I think that's what the parent was talking about.

[lambda]

Sorry, I meant N9 when I said N900 which was earlier. Yes, it was actually released, and I would have been interested in it if it weren't for the fact that they released it right as they cancelled Meego development and switched to Windows. Now there have been several forks of that effort since then, like Sailfish and Tizen, but they haven't actually shipped anything yet, so it's been two years without any real updates.

I agree that it's promising and more hacker friendly than Android. I've been following it for years, and keep thinking "that looks interesting, maybe I'll get one once they've completed their transition to Qt (so I don't start writing GTK apps that will be deprecated soon)" or "maybe I'll get one once they've finished migrating from Maemo to Meego", but every time I do that, there's some new major shift or the project is cancelled or the like.

So, I have some hope for Sailfish, but it's still vaporware as far as actually shipping hardware, and the history of the project and confusing family tree has left me somewhat skeptical, and not willing to spend serious effort on it until it stops being vaporware and someone actually manages to ship a version 2 of the same platform without some complete rewrite of some major component of the platform.

[matt_kantor]

As mentioned elsewhere in the comments, Jolla's first device launches today: http://gadgets.ndtv.com/mobiles/news/jolla-sailfish-os-power...

[lambda]

Yes, I was answering the question "I always wondered why Jolla is getting so little love from HN." Until today, it has been vaporware. In fact, it's still vaporware as far as I can see; there isn't a "buy" button, there's a "sign up to be emailed when it's ready", though it looks like they are launching in Finland today and the rest of the world later.

[jggonz]

> Probably hasn't been getting much attention because so far it is vaporware (until you can actually buy a device, it's not all that interesting

I think having other "Android"-compatible phones out there is very interesting. The more options there are for the consumer, the better off we are. Take a look at the iPhone vs Android scene. If it weren't for other options being available, we'd still be living with 3.5" LCDs and a completely closed-source operating system.

Btw, you could call any product vaporware at some point. (take a look at kickstarter and other crowdfunding sites. most of those products are in some form vaporware, yet lots of people now know the Pebble, Oculus Rift... etc...)

[Angostura]

> I think having other "Android"-compatible phones out there is very interesting.

It would be interesting if I understood what particular problem it solves, which I don't really.

[adamors]

> Sailfish OS, a truly open mobile operating system

[dotBen]

"More options are better for the consumer:" not if you consider fragmentation. While this runs Android apps, it's not clear if it's fully/"acid" compliant and the risk is Sailfish's flavor of Android is a black-sheep stepchild of Android that doesn't always run Android apps properly.

"BTW you can call any product vaporware" - not really. The iPhone wasn't vaporware as it was never officially mentioned before it was released. Android was launched pretty early on with the G1, etc.

[kryptiskt]

> The iPhone wasn't vaporware as it was never officially mentioned before it was released.

iPhone was announced on January 9 2007 and went on sale June 29 the same year.

[shmerl]

It's not a vaporware (unlike Canonical's Edge). It's an actual product in production which is already being sold! Check your facts.

[specialp]

I have been following Jolla for a long time and have owned n900 and the N9. Yes until they actually sell a phone to a real customer it is not being sold. Vaporware is a bit of a strong word but they have come out with many announcements so far and after nearly 2 years there is no product in anyone's hands.

[Geee]

What do you mean? They sold their first 450 handsets today. Although it was a pre-order sales only, but that means something.

[tellarin]

They've actually sold many more devices (per-order). What they did now was to deliver the first 450 devices.

[HunOL]

I think that ubuntu touch, ubuntu edge and etc get more attention than jolla for no reasons.

[pekk]

That depends on what people invest in delivering.

The best idea in the world could be sunk by a decision to switch to Windows Phone, and you would judge it as "under-delivery"

[davidw]

> I always wondered why Jolla is getting so little love from HN

As a hacker, I want to work on stuff that has a snowball's chance in hell of getting some traction, and in a market with very strong network effects, demonstrating this is up to newcomers. There have been other operating systems for mobile phones that looked cool, but suffered from lack of traction as well.

[shmerl]

As a hacker I want to work on things which are interesting to me and are in line with my values ;)

[davidw]

There's plenty of free software stuff to work on with Linux that a ton of people use and enjoy. And then there's stuff that, to me at least, seems like a "suicide mission":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openmoko

Bright people, good work, and so on, but it's sad to see something you do go nowhere.

[shmerl]

Jolla looks to me better than Openmoko when it comes to adoption chances. And they are doing things right, basing their work on the common middleware (Mer + Nemo). PlasmaActive also uses Mer. They aren't suicide mission, they are a startup with planned strategy and aim to be profitable. Let's see how they fare.

[davidw]

I wish them the best of luck; I was just explaining why as a developer, I'm a bit leery of a new platform like this. I feel for them, as I know it's a very tough spot to be in.

[shmerl]

It's tough on one hand, and it's a wild frontier waiting for more pioneers on the other hand, since there is lack of innovation (Android and iOS are pretty much stalled when it comes to introducing new ideas). So newcomers have good chances of providing interesting alternatives. I'd worry more about the sickening patents situation, than about lack of interest in new platforms.

But surely they'll need to attract developers more, since many aren't familiar with Sailfish. There was a recent post about from Mer folks:

http://mer-project.blogspot.com/2013/11/a-sailfishos-co-crea...

[shooper]

From the infamous burning platform memo, the rationale for leaving Meego for Windows Phone:

>"The battle of devices has now become a war of ecosystems, where ecosystems include not only the hardware and software of the device, but developers, applications, ecommerce, advertising, search, social applications, location-based services, unified communications and many other things. Our competitors aren’t taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem. This means we’re going to have to decide how we either build, catalyze or join an ecosystem."

Jolla's move to support Android apps is to try to mitigate the above effect, but it may lead to the Windows vs. OS/2 scenario where OS/2 ran Windows programs too well, so companies never bothered making native OS/2 apps, after all, why waste precious resources on supporting yet another incompatible platform?

On the other side, as I said in another comment, you have huge companies selling smartphones at or below cost using their profits from other lines of business(Nexus 5, Moto G, Lumia 520(a surprisingly good smartphone for $59 off contract?!!)). They're doing this to either gain marketshare for the ecosystem effects(Microsoft) or as a moat, to sell ads, or to commoditize and reduce Apple's smartphone margins(Google)[1].

Jolla has to compete with these and ultracheap Chinese and India OEMs at the low end and the iPhones, high end Galaxies, Lumias with 41MP cameras and 6" screens, HTC, LG phablets at the high end.

I wish them luck, they need it.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/25/search-googles-castle-moat/

[Maakuth]

On the other hand, one can create Sailfish-native Qt apps that run on Android and iPhone as well. I'm not sure if Qt iOS support is completely ready, but it is something to look forward.

[shmerl]

> I always wondered why Jolla is getting so little love from HN. To me and from a geek / hacker point of view, Jolla is an awful lot more interesting than Android.

Indeed, this is somewhat surprising. And so many people here had no clue what Jolla and Sailfish are.