Ask HN: Invest in Sailfish OS?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14475889

by pasta • 9 years ago

4 5 9 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Currently I'm searching for a new smartphone. And at the moment there are 4 OSes left: Android, iOS, Windows and Blackberry.

A lot of app makers are dropping support for Windows, and Blackberry is already putting Android on devices, so there are only two real options left.

But I have been following Sailfish for some years and to me it looks very promissing. Later this month Sony will add support for (all?) Xperia devices and Russia and China are also busy developing for Sailfish OS.

So I got the feeling Sailfish could become the third option in the near future.

What do you think? Could Sailfish be worth investing in?

dman• 9 years ago

Very unlikely in my opinion. The economic barrier to entry to bootstrapping a mobile ecosystem appear to be so high that extremely well funded efforts have floundered, I see very little reason why Sailfish will succeed where others have failed. List of failed efforts to jumpstart mobile ecosystems are - Creative (ziilabs), Microsoft (multiple efforts), Blackberry, Nokia (Maemo and Symbian), Ubuntu (Ubuntu phone).

pasta2• 9 years ago

Maybe. But they have one pro: most Android apps also run on Sailfish.

proyb2• 9 years ago

Do Sailfish have their own app stores like PlayStore and AppStore? QT tooling for Sailfish is a bit hard sell than Kotlin and Swift were employed.

If Swift could run on Sailfish, it's even worth to invest.

pasta2• 9 years ago

The app store can be found at https://harbour.jolla.com/

It's also possible to develop Android apps that can run on both systems.

d5jExdeX8Yr5DSY• 9 years ago

Sailfish, itself, is free. If you get a phone that's supported as part of Sony's Open Devices Program: https://developer.sonymobile.com/open-devices/list-of-device... , you may be able to use it with both Sailfish and Android. Although, I expect that support for the more fancy components on the newest phones will take longest to arrive in Sailfish.

Ask HN: Invest in Sailfish OS?

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