Poll: If you could install any mobile operating system

I would still disagree: They regulary rebase on Android after major releases and the differences are mostly what you described. Cyanogen is still very much Android.

The marketshare of devices with CyanogenOS (which is NOT the same as CyanogenMod), is unknown, but might in fact be rising. Cyanogen has sadly started to offer extension apps only closed source and for CyanogenOS. I understand that perfectly from the viewpoint Cyanogen, the corporation, and i am fine with that. It is is just a tad confusing.

Just a side note: Finally, something like that will come in Android M, which is the sucessor to Android 5.1. If Fairphone want’s to deliver on software sustainability, that update simply has to be released for FP2 some time in future.

That is not entirely true. There are developes at Jolla that have been working on Mobile linux for years and avid open source contributors to Maemo and Meego and Mer.

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You almost tempted me to… :stuck_out_tongue: (On a more serious note, I chose Firefox OS because of its platform-independent webapps).

This poll got mentioned on Twitter by @Jolla_DE :smiley:

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Ok now I’m no longer wondering why Sailfish got so many votes. Especially since he makes it sound like this is a democratic election.

But it also shows that Sailfish has some serious supporters :slight_smile: . Would be interesting what happens if the Firefox and Ubuntu communites got involved as well :slight_smile:

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Do you think that many people would create an account just for that poll? Are new members even capable of voting during their first day?

It’s hard to say. The last few days a lot more people joined the forum than usually, but I guess that mainly has to do with the new fairphone being announced! :smiley:
But I can see that many of those who joined only viewed one topic, didn’t post anything and spent little time on the forum.

I don’t know if new members can vote but it doesn’t say that they can’t in the topic about trust levels:

PS: I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing that someone recruits sailfish enthusiasts to our forum but this sort of campaigning is one reason why the fairphone team shouldn’t take our poll results at face value.
Polls are just for the community to have fun with and not to make decisions for Fairphone.

PPS: I think its quite obvious that we have a lot more Sailfish enthusiasts now than before the FP2 was announced. In the original poll there are 219 posts by 106 users and only 23 posts (by 18 users) mention “Sailfish”. As opposed to e.g. 28 users mentioning “Ubuntu”, 34 mentioning “Firefox” and 34 mentioning “cyanogen”.

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Go with SailfishOS please.

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@Niklas_Wallin, welcome to the forum. If you want the Fairphone team to hear you you should contact them directly.
And may I ask you how you found our forum? Are you a potential Fairphone customer or a Sailfish enthusiast who wants to see Sailfish on as many devices as possible?

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Voted for Ubuntu, but actually I´m even more interested in two OS´s that are not on the List yet.

First is Silent Sircle (Blackphone OS)

But what i would most love to see is TAILS (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) once the mobile Port is ready.
Here is the Latest source i found concerning the mobile port but maybe someone knows more about its current state?

However this leads me to another Question:
Can the Fairphone (1 or 2) boot from a an sd-card, or a usb-drive?

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I’m not 100% sure but doubt it. It is very rare for smartphones to really boot from SD-card. You can flash a ROM from an SD-Card but that’s nothing like the TAILS experience where you get a fresh system everytime you boot. You would have to reflash each and everytime.

Edit: There might be ways to do it. You definitely need to flash a different bootloader first though.

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Hello, everybody

nice discussions and very good and informative posts here.

I’ve met Fairphone only today and have found this thread looking for Firefox OS support, as I use it since december of 2013.

I wil not make a post advocating for Fairphone to directly support or develop the “bits” needed to have this or another OS running on it’s phone, but instead to stick with as free as possible hardware, firmware and drivers and also be supportive with the teams of each OS so they can do the real implementations easily. Most OS projects have documents like “porting to new hardware”, maybe we could have a list for “porting OSes to fairphone” like a counter-part =)

Kind regards,
Daniel

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How does Firefox OS work for you?

Firefox OS nowadays is pretty acceptable.
In fact I’ve started using it sooner in 2013 when I got a GeeksPhone Keon borrowed from a friend that earned from Mozilla at Campus Party Brasil.
Since then, Firefox OS have improved very much. I’ve started with version 1.3 on Keon, then in december I got another GeeksPhone, but this time it is a Peak device, with better hardware. I’ve recently updated it to version 2.2, downloaded from GP site and it brings very good improvements (gps now works, navigation is smoothier, the UI is more clean and a lot of other improvements that is being integrated every 6 months or so).
The apps on the marker are also evolving, when I first tried openWapp (https://marketplace.firefox.com/app/openwapp) it could not handle groups at all, but recent versions made it and also to open videos and audio received.
There are alternatives like Telegram app (https://marketplace.firefox.com/app/telegram) that works very well, altough there is only some friends of mine who really use it.
Another nice app is Quake Benchmark (https://marketplace.firefox.com/app/quake-benchmark) that is a 3D world like a quake scenario.
There is also apps for Facebook and YouTube there are the actual mobile site versions registered at the market place. Google Maps site also works well, with GPS location via Geolocation API (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Geolocation/Using_geolocation).

Also, for gamers, there are plenty of mini-games available and things are getting better for 3D games as the Unity engine was ported to Javascript/WebGL using Emscripten (http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/04/29/on-the-future-of-web-publishing-in-unity/ ) and also there are other improvements on the Javascript world like asm.js (https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/03/asm-speedups-everywhere/)

There are some bugs with all of this, of course, but I think it worths, because it is a nice eco-system and very free (it is also almos 100% java-free, so you will have less hassle with (re-)licensing)

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I chose (Fairphone) Android for a simple and selfish reason: There are millions of apps already available on the various Android stores and trying something newer like Firefox or Ubuntu, although very tempting, means starting from scratch, waiting for developers to come up with equivalent apps, and probably years before the app stores offer a half as comprehensive choice of apps as the Android ones.
Ideally I would like to be able to dual-boot my phone with Android for continuing normal use and another OS for experimentation, just like I do on my PC with Windows and various flavours of Linux.

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It really depends on two different cases: On one side, Nowadays, at least in Norway where I live, a mobile phone with android or iOs is really a neccesity, You use it for banking, for public transport, listening to broadcasts etc. etc. so realistically any mobile phone I would ever use needs to be able to run apps from those systems, either natively or emulated
On the other hand, my former mobile phone was a Nokia n900 running maemo which was kind of a wrapping on a full fledged debian system, and running debian on all my home pcs, I really loved using maemo, So for the feeling of use, I’d love to have any system as close to standard linux as possible. - If sailfish is really able to run android apps and what I have heard about it linux compability is true, that is probably my dream mobile OS. - but as other have said, the important ting is to be able to choose.

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Well, that has made the poll worthless now. I hope the discussion still has some value…

@Paul: The poll was aimed at the question which OS users would prefer “if a genie or a fairy would grant you that wish”. I would then probably vote for Ubuntu, although the Fairy should grant me three wishes: one about the choice of OS for FP2 and the other being that Ubuntu is all of a sudden a complete OS with perfect convergence with the desktop. A thrid wish would be that Ubuntu would have included the option to restrict privacy settings on individual apps, which I haven’t heard anything about until now.

Related to the above: it seems that there is still a lot that we don’t know about the possibilities of the different OS-es. For example, I thought that Ubuntu also had the possibilitiy for webb-apps. But I am not sure here. Althouth the discussion is already to a large extent hypothetical - first since the list of technical details of FP2 already shows that the OS will be Android 5.1 and second, becuase the different OSes (especially Ubuntu) are in constand development) I would very much like the comparison of the different OS-es to be a factual one: based on current situation and future possibilities. It would be amazing, if the OSes could be compared to the followint qualities:
OS-es listes: one extreme/the other extreme

  1. Openness of OS (how much of the OS is open source) --> Replicant/ Apple
  2. Openness of Apps (how ‘free’ are you to install your own apps) --> Replicant/ Apple
  3. Availability of Apps (how many apps are there?) --> Android / Firefox
  4. Availability to restrict rights to indiv. apps --> CyanogenMod / Android
  5. ‘Android-like’ UI (the grid/tyle system mostly used) --> Android / Ubuntu and Sailfish

Clearly quite a lot of research should be done, since it should go further then what most user (including me) have ‘read on a forum somewhere’. Maybe a similar comparison has already been made elsewhere. I would be really interesting in something like this, if anybody knows a link?

Also, I can inmagine that Fairphone developers are quite interested in the imporance that FP-users put on those individual OS-qualities. I participated in a poll on my personality-type a couple of weeks ago. Maybe something similar could be done about the OS-es: users are asked to divide 10 points between these five - or six or more - qualitites?

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OT:

Did you mean me? If you type ‘@’ + a name you have to type the exact user name - or select it from the list that pops up - or you can end up summoning a user who hasn’t been active since September '14.

You are right, that would be customary, unfortunately polls with three selections don’t work with our current Discourse version yet.

Indeed that would be cool. Wikipdeias comparison of mobile operating system has some of that information. But:

  • Openness of OS: I guess you can just make categories, but not give a percent value. E.G:
  • 100% free
  • Aims to be 100% free but contains some 3rd party proprietary elements
  • Mostly free and open source, without the expressed goal of being 100% free in the future
  • Partially Open Source
  • Proprietary
  • Openness of Apps: You could either compare the percentage of FOSS apps in the repositories or make categories again:
  • Only 100% free Apps allowed
  • Only 100% free Apps in the official repository but you can download from other sources
  • No restrictions for Apps licenses in repository but proprietary Apps are clearly marked as such.
  • No restrictions
  • Only proprietary Apps
  • Availability of Apps: You can just compare the numbers of Apps available in the repositories and whether you can download from other sources. But I the number will be falsified by the number of useless, buggy and malicious Apps.

My vote goes to SailfishOS, I will purchase the FairPhone 2 if it comes with SailfishOS!

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@schept, you may be right with the poll beeing kind of worthless in your context. But on the other hand, usrs like me got introduced to Fairphone this way. I wouldn’t be too sad. see it as a proof of how like minded sailfish and fairphone users seem to be in many regards :wink: opensourcing ui of sailfish, well thats another story. Most sailfish users are willing to believe jollas promise to fully openspource at a point that certain market reach is accomplished. time will tell.

I would buy a fairphone if i only could flash a mint sailfish port to it myself. No need to limit your whole userbase to the choice of one os imho.

Maybe Fairphone could support porters in some way? at least with know how.

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@mosen, @WilliePre Welcome to the forum!

This is what we know so far:

Fairphone wants to bring more fairness to software. In line with our
overall design objectives, our strategy for software focuses on
openness, transparency and ownership with which we aim to achieve more
product longevity.
We’re using open source methods to help us achieve our goals. This
includes striving to make our operating system (OS) source code and
development environment available for anyone to use, review, modify and
improve.
At the same time, we are looking to collaborate with established
alternative operating system vendors that share our ideas for openness.
We’re in discussions with organizations to develop alternative operating
systems that are optimized for the Fairphone 2. Our aim is to give
users the choice in the operating systems that they want to use, instead
of being limited to one that the manufacturer has pre-selected.
Fairphone | The phone that cares for people and planet

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