After a couple weeks of daily-driving Sailfish OS on the new Jolla Phone 2 (2026), here's my take on the European, privacy-first alternative to the Android and iOS duopoly. Design, hardware, camera...
Also, no mainline kernel support. Pretty sure it’d be easy to do for Jolla (even I manage to do some mainlining work and I don’t sell phones).
This means it’ll be a security nightmare at some point, just like any other phone.
Plus the specific app format. You cannot install the many nice GNOME apps, KDE apps and others that already exist.
I do have a SailfishOS phone for testing, but to make it even a bit useful I’d have to use AppSupport, which is Android in a container with a proprietary wrapper. There are barely any apps, they should leverage the power of the many mobile Linux apps that exist. I’d rather have some apps with a UI that looks different to the rest than not having what I need.
Sailfish OS can run on mainline kernel. The Jolla Phone does not run a mainline kernel because it consists of off the shelf phone components and those are for Android phones outside of the world of iOS.
Mainlining is anything but easy if you aim is a functioning daily driver and not a tinker project, especially in a team as small as Jolla’s with so many more urgent tasks.
The kernel depends on the hardware. Trying to get hardware with mainline kernel support is hard and expensive. Mainlining isn’t the trivial task you make it out to be, otherwise postmarket would not struggle that much. Or tell me which device just works with postmarket OS?
Sailfish OS can work with mainline Linux kernels, it has been ported to the Pine Phone for example.
It is not trivial, it can be. The company designing the phone can choose components with mainline kernel support over others.
If you choose an SoC with decent support and, for example, a vibration module or modem with decent mainline support, you just have to write a device tree.
If you build a phone, you know what regulators exist, what voltages they have and where they connect.
It’s not the type of reverse engineering I have to do myself, the phone company knows their own device.
And even if they task another company to do it, they can just write in their contract “provide us with the following” and they get what they need.
It’s a lot easier for a phone company than for people doing it in their spare time by reverse engineering things.
Yes, you can choose components and then you get something like the Pinephone. Do I really need to go on why there are substantial downsides connected to that?dann können Of course, if you sell 10 mio phones things get easier but that is ou of reach for any such project by a long shot.
Or which mainline Linux phone with acceptable hardware am I unaware of?
Oh, there are many acceptable phones, as people use Linux phones and this community also exists. There are many Linux phone users out there that accept a phone and choose to use it.
No need to use a Pinephone, we have more modern SoC that are well supported, such as SM6350, SDM845, SDM670, SC7280…
EDIT: Also, what I forgot to mention is that you really don’t need to sell 10 million phones to build usable and decent hardware. See for example Fairphone, they have sold less than a million.
Name me a concrete phone model that has no significant compromises in hardware functionality. Maybe I missed those when I had a look into it.
The Postmarket wiki only shows a handful of devices where Call functionality is classified with “Yes”, rather than “Partial” or even “No”. Other than Pine Phone and Purism Librem that is only the Shift6mq from 2020 and four Xiaomi devices with the newest one being also from 2020, all of those have core functionality that does not fully work. Maybe that wiki is horrendously out of date but then this doesn’t do good service to give newcomers a good idea where the project stands.
BTW: I am not saying btw that postmarket isn’t interesting nonetheless to many people and a great project.
The app format lock in sounds crazy to me. How does it stop you from running other apps? Does it not have a terminal? Does it not give you sudo? Does it refuse to run any executables, or is it about the ui toolkit?
There is no lock in, there are merely incompatibilities. You can install sudo, but by default there is devel-su which is pretty much the same thing. You can install rpms and if you don’t like pkcon you can install zypper as package manager. As long as you stay within the terminal emulator things tend to work.
There is a misunderstanding that desktop programs would be such a great boon for a mobile phone. But mobile phones suck with desktop UI. You need a mobile UI for it to make sense and that is exactly where incompatibilities are coming from.
I installed a community port of the qt6 based KDE plasma browser Angelfish for example and it is running just fine on Sailfish OS.
They just have their own format using their owm SailfishOS-specific UI libraries. Their apps don’t work elsewhere without patching, there’s no Flatpak and they only have SailfishOS apps in the repo.
Sure, you can write your own apps, but I prefer using what’s already there.
Also, no mainline kernel support. Pretty sure it’d be easy to do for Jolla (even I manage to do some mainlining work and I don’t sell phones).
This means it’ll be a security nightmare at some point, just like any other phone.
Plus the specific app format. You cannot install the many nice GNOME apps, KDE apps and others that already exist.
I do have a SailfishOS phone for testing, but to make it even a bit useful I’d have to use AppSupport, which is Android in a container with a proprietary wrapper. There are barely any apps, they should leverage the power of the many mobile Linux apps that exist. I’d rather have some apps with a UI that looks different to the rest than not having what I need.
Sailfish OS can run on mainline kernel. The Jolla Phone does not run a mainline kernel because it consists of off the shelf phone components and those are for Android phones outside of the world of iOS.
Mainlining is anything but easy if you aim is a functioning daily driver and not a tinker project, especially in a team as small as Jolla’s with so many more urgent tasks.
PS: Angelfish runs just fine on my Jolla Phone.
“more urgent tasks”
Jolla could just mainline and open source and they’d get more developer power, the devs just prefer devices that are more open
Also, I’m mainlining stuff myself, without being a phone company. Surely they’d have a much easier time.
The kernel depends on the hardware. Trying to get hardware with mainline kernel support is hard and expensive. Mainlining isn’t the trivial task you make it out to be, otherwise postmarket would not struggle that much. Or tell me which device just works with postmarket OS?
Sailfish OS can work with mainline Linux kernels, it has been ported to the Pine Phone for example.
It is not trivial, it can be. The company designing the phone can choose components with mainline kernel support over others.
If you choose an SoC with decent support and, for example, a vibration module or modem with decent mainline support, you just have to write a device tree.
If you build a phone, you know what regulators exist, what voltages they have and where they connect.
It’s not the type of reverse engineering I have to do myself, the phone company knows their own device.
And even if they task another company to do it, they can just write in their contract “provide us with the following” and they get what they need.
It’s a lot easier for a phone company than for people doing it in their spare time by reverse engineering things.
Yes, you can choose components and then you get something like the Pinephone. Do I really need to go on why there are substantial downsides connected to that?dann können Of course, if you sell 10 mio phones things get easier but that is ou of reach for any such project by a long shot.
Or which mainline Linux phone with acceptable hardware am I unaware of?
Oh, there are many acceptable phones, as people use Linux phones and this community also exists. There are many Linux phone users out there that accept a phone and choose to use it.
No need to use a Pinephone, we have more modern SoC that are well supported, such as SM6350, SDM845, SDM670, SC7280…
EDIT: Also, what I forgot to mention is that you really don’t need to sell 10 million phones to build usable and decent hardware. See for example Fairphone, they have sold less than a million.
Name me a concrete phone model that has no significant compromises in hardware functionality. Maybe I missed those when I had a look into it.
The Postmarket wiki only shows a handful of devices where Call functionality is classified with “Yes”, rather than “Partial” or even “No”. Other than Pine Phone and Purism Librem that is only the Shift6mq from 2020 and four Xiaomi devices with the newest one being also from 2020, all of those have core functionality that does not fully work. Maybe that wiki is horrendously out of date but then this doesn’t do good service to give newcomers a good idea where the project stands.
BTW: I am not saying btw that postmarket isn’t interesting nonetheless to many people and a great project.
The app format lock in sounds crazy to me. How does it stop you from running other apps? Does it not have a terminal? Does it not give you sudo? Does it refuse to run any executables, or is it about the ui toolkit?
Sorry for the barrage, that sounded outrageous
There is no lock in, there are merely incompatibilities. You can install sudo, but by default there is devel-su which is pretty much the same thing. You can install rpms and if you don’t like pkcon you can install zypper as package manager. As long as you stay within the terminal emulator things tend to work.
There is a misunderstanding that desktop programs would be such a great boon for a mobile phone. But mobile phones suck with desktop UI. You need a mobile UI for it to make sense and that is exactly where incompatibilities are coming from.
I installed a community port of the qt6 based KDE plasma browser Angelfish for example and it is running just fine on Sailfish OS.
They just have their own format using their owm SailfishOS-specific UI libraries. Their apps don’t work elsewhere without patching, there’s no Flatpak and they only have SailfishOS apps in the repo.
Sure, you can write your own apps, but I prefer using what’s already there.
This is what really makes it a non-starter for me. Also, if there was a mainline kernel, I could just install any other distro I want instead.
I’m still waiting for a somewhat modern phone with a fully functional mainline kernel.