20 Days with Sailfish OS. Here’s my experience
Android and iOS aren’t the only two Operating systems for smartphones. There are huge chances you never heard but a few OSes came and left. Blackberry OS is one we all know of. Symbian as well. Heck, Windows Phone died trying to catch adoption. Not really sure if you’ve heard of Meego and then there was Firefox OS.
All the ones mentioned above have left us. Ubuntu Touch was thrown into the well by Canonical but another group (UBports) pulled it back alive with hopes for its future. That we’ll have to see.
Another one that we have is Sailfish OS from Finland. Its a reboot from MeegoOS which Nokia killed along with Symbian when they transitioned towards windows phone. Oh wow, that just gave me a thought, every operating system that Nokia had touched so far has died. Let’s see what happens to Android now. Okay back to the topic. So Sailfish is developed by passionate meego developers who refused to give up on the operating system, thereby they set up a new company, Jolla. Sailfish ain’t android based nor has the design principle matching to that of iOS, Android or Windows.
So, this article is essentially my experience with Sailfish for 3 weeks. So, let’s begin. First with the device.
The Device
The device earmarked for sailfish is not one of the officially supported. The goat we’re looking at is a YU Yureka Plus (codename: tomato). Never heard of the brand? It’s Indian.
Here are the device’s specs :
Processor: Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 64-bit Octa-core
RAM: 2 GB
GPU: Adreno 405
Storage: 16 GB
Display: 1080x1920 FHD
Display Size: 5.5 inches, 401 ppi
Cellular: 2G, 2G, 4G, VoLTE
Camera: 13.1 MP Rear with flash. 5 MP front
Battery: 2500 mAh
OS: Sailfish OS 2.2.1.18 [Nurmonjoki] — Community Edition (hybris-14.1)
So yeah, basically an android device but one with official support from LineageOS. The device has plenty of AOSP based ROMs ported but never had Sailfish/Ubuntu/Tizen/Others ported to it. While I wasn’t really bored of Android but I always wanted to try sailfish OS. What to do, I decided to port it myself. Sailfish has a brilliant HADK and the community is helpful.
The OS
Done porting. I had plenty of issues in the process but as I said the community is helpful I had most of my things sorted by the community, mostly by Matti Lehtimäki.
Sailfish is unlike any other OS existing in the market. To start with, the Home screen doesn’t hold any icon or widget. It’s clean but as you start opening apps their tiles start showing up on the home screen. So, it’s the equivalent to recents from Android, but better in every way. First, they’re all live. Second, you see a lot more apps altogether unlike the stacks in other OSes so switching between an app you just opened and an app you opened 8 apps before is quick. Most importantly, the Home-screen recents turns out to be very helpful once you learn to peek behind any app to the home screen. You can anytime see the status of other apps without leaving your current app.
In total, the OS really has just 4 pages. Namely Lock screen, Home, App drawer, and Events. Minimal enough? This combination leaves all the space for apps and multitasking.
The user interface is filled with translucent pages, apps, and menus. Everything looks connected and an ambiance(theme) switch changes the colors throughout the OS. The ambiances are not just wallpaper and colors packages. They are profiles, so silence Ambience puts its wallpaper, color and silences the devices. Yep, that means you can have different ringtones set with different ambiances and change them as per your mood without actually having to go to settings. Heck, you just need a swipe!
The Gestures
Speaking of swipes lets talk gestures as this is one OS which heavily uses gesture-based navigation. To an extent where once gotten used to, you’d crave for the same everywhere.
The app drawer is accessible from everywhere with a swipe from the bottom
edge (Even when you are in any app).
Same is the case with home screen. A right/left edge swipe in any app takes you to home screen. This also helps for peeking as talked about in the previous section.
The notifications (or events) panel comes with a right/left swipe on the home screen. All your notifications and quick setting tiles are present there.
A swipe from the top edge anywhere reveals the Ambience switcher and lock-screen button.
Then there’s Pulley Menu system. The in-app menu is accessed by pulling up/down from the middle of the screen and a selector highlights the menu options as you pull just leave it
P.S. Normal swipes and edge swipes are different in Sailfish OS. For example, in any app a left to right edge swipe would take you to the home screen but left to right (not edges) swipe would take you to the previous page in the app itself. Which points out the next difference. Sailfish doesn’t use any touch keys. Home, back, tasks, app settings are all just a swipe away.
Enough with the intro. Let’s talk about the experience
P.S. This is all done on a community port and not on any officially supported device. The issues I discuss here might not apply on other devices and wherever I talk about performance I’m comparing it with performance on Android N on the same device.
First is the System UI
The user interface as aforementioned is unlike what Android or iOS offer. Sailfish UI is glassy all over. Blur effects and transparency details take the first priority in the whole of the OS and the apps. Images explain that better.
With such homogeneous UI all around, it’s best to have integrated services from social networks. And that’s what these guys strive for. Google services integrate into People(Contacts) and Calender well as expected, additionally google talk integrates with messaging app. That was just google, there are other services too, Facebook events go to calender, images show up in gallery, notifications show up in events. Even twitter feed shows up in your events page. (‘Events’ in Sailfish is the notification page). VK integrates well too. I don’t use it, I have no idea.
Translucent UI looks great right? Beauty. That’s what I saw the OS as but gradually as I use it more, it feels a bit overdone. Too much of the same UI throughout gets boring and changing Ambiances for a rescue does little help. Plus the translucent design pattern makes it harder to read, framing it as a no-go for long readings. Translucent design only in the menus would be fine.
Second, come to the apps
Since the Sailfish build in consideration is a community port. We’ll not consider android apps support over here. Which is good, this is a pure sailfish experience here. First of all, you need a Jolla account to install the basic apps and get the Jolla store working. That’s easy and doesn’t require your card details.
The count of native apps as you’d expect is not up to the mark for today’s active usage. Also, whats there lacks customization, with plenty of the third party apps being web-wrappers only. I talk about the problem with this one in the next section. The whole ecosystem is dependent on community-developed apps as I don’t see many mainstream businesses putting efforts for a negligible community. Pretty much like the job experience cycle.
You could say its one of the reasons why most of the Android/iOS alternatives are dead now. Official sailfish OS brings Alien Dalvik as the savior for the apps deficiency. Alien dalvik is not free(as in beer) and hence is not present in the community ports.
Third, the Web Browser
Well, hold on Yash... isn’t browser just another app and can be discussed in the section above? Yeah sure but in an environment where you don’t have many apps, a browser is the thing you’ll spend most of the time on. In the case of Sailfish OS, the web browsing experience is pretty… average.
The stock browser uses Mozilla’s gecko web engine. It works but that’s about it, the gecko engine is a bit old and performance lags compared to firefox on android. Scrolling a webpage is not smooth, you see white patches covering the web content during a scroll and you can notice the device struggling to keep up with the movement. Sluggishness increases exponentially with the increase in (Java?)Scripts on the webpage.
There is webcat browser available as an alternative(The only alternative perhaps) which uses QT5 webkit engine for page rendering and the performance to me seems more or less the same.
IMHO, the browser design choice is not the most intuitive either. Neither of “new tab” and “close tab” options are present in front of you. To open new tab you either select the open new tab option from the pulley menu in tabs list or click in the + sign the menu bar options. Also, the placement is kinda weird. The menu options (The four bars) are on the right side but the + (New tab) button is on the left in that. Here, a flow chart to explain what I mean.
Fourth is about Performance
Lightweight OS, hardly few services running, No tracking of your usage and location 24x7. Sweet! You have your privacy and there’s hardly anything to eat battery and processing power in the background. Further, the lack of apps results in lesser screen usage. Sounds just perfect for performance, and battery saving. Now here’s what I saw…
Performance on my device is visibly worse compared to what Android offers. Throughout the OS. Scrolling is not as natural and sometimes lags. Even on basic pages like settings. Menu transitions are smooth when both side pages have like 30% content and that too text. Add images and it starts feeling like the OS is an electron like web-app. Native apps like depecher (telegram client, native) feel like web apps with still the performance worse compared to how Via browser handles facebook website on Android. Well, those were images, guess I dared to try out videos too. FHD Videos on Native player lag, I mean this phone has an FHD screen, can play 4k videos on Android. Yeah, don’t ask me about web streaming. Everything works but keeps reminding you about the performance of android (and apps) on the same device.
Yo, enough of ranting and again let me put it again that this was the performance review on a non-officially supported device. Not *much* of devices specific optimizations I did.
Coming to battery performance. It’s just what you’d expect from a lightweight OS. Charging is super fast, and background battery drain is minimal. It’s just great. I don’t get this even without all the google apps on android.
Fifth goes for multitasking
This is GNU/Linux, developed by the Linux enthusiasts and they do indeed care about multitasking. Even if it involves a bit of learning curve. Thanks to the gestures focus and the OS design, Sailfish OS I tell you excels in multitasking front. Just beats any other smartphone OS I’ve used.
The home screen has one use. To show running apps. Tiles of each app show up on home as you start open a few. Live. And the apps also have a say on what they show in the their tiles. That’s up to the developers.
The app drawer is accessible from everywhere.
Once gotten used to, swipes aid in for more natural and fast interactions.
Apps run like bosses. Full resources available even when running in background. Literally. So minimize the browser running YouTube and it would still be running. Heck, lock your screen and virtually its your music player now. Doesn’t seem to affect battery as much as Android does tho.
The OS tries to integrate services in the ecosystem. Which is nice. I logged into twitter and I could see feed in the notifications panel itself. Below other notifications so they’re not intrusive.
Here’s another feature which I never got to know until I read it somewhere. Auto-rotation is great but sometimes you don’t want it. Sure we can turn it off, its just a swipe-n-tap away. In all the OSes. But here they’ve added one realistic feature. When you rotate your device with a finger on screen, it won’t rotate. It’s like you’re holding the contents there. It doesn’t turn off the auto rotation, just prevents it temporarily. You don’t have to keep “holding the contents” for it to not rotate. Just hold em while rotating and then leave that’s it.
Cool stuff I must tell you. Really addictive UX I must say. The use of swipes in this OS is just... perfect! No wonder why Google and Apple have been adding more swipe based navigation to their OSes.
This was the last iteration of Sailfish 2.x
This post I’m writing in the last days of sailfish 2.x series and SailfishOS 3 is near. I mean it’s really close. I could really write about SailfishOS 3 directly a few days later but I didn’t see I was this close while porting. The 3rd version is also under my eyes to be ported and tested. Although, I’m back on Android for now and the reason is primarily the lack of android apps and web performance. I could’ve worked around for android apps but with below par web performance I can’t stand much.
That’s it. I had to let go of the gestures. The uniqueness. The simplicity.
The OS is brilliant and no one else seems to be complaining about the performance issues in Sailfish anywhere so maximum chances are there that the device here is probably not the best test pig for it. But this is all I have as my main driver and test bunny.
That’s it for now, folks! See Y’all soon enough after the Sailfish 3.0 Release!
Auf Wiedersehen!
