Sailfish OS for Fairphones devices

Hello SailfishOS fans,
@mal released the first (alpha1) SailfishOS version for Fairphone4 and Fairphone5 (see here).

Because he always is very busy i will copy the release info here:

Sailfish OS 4.6.0.15 for Fairphone 4 and 5 is now available at Index of /images/ . These are fastboot flashable images with home encryption enabled. It is recommended to upgrade Android to latest version first to get latest firmware fixes and boot to Android once and test all hardware features especially mobile data and fingerprint support to make sure everything works before flashing Sailfish OS.

Also the older already existing port for Fairphone 2 is available in the same location.

Known issues

Fairphone 5

  • Video recording in camera
  • Hardware video codecs (apps playing videos freeze, I will try to find a way to disable hw codecs until I figure out why this happens)
  • USB connections to computer not working with some USB ports, if devices seems to go into connect/disconnect loop try another USB port
  • eSIM not supported

Fairphone 4

  • Video recording in camera
  • Bluetooth has some issues after boot (mostly with audio related bluetooth devices), restarting bluetooth service via Settings->Utilities should fix the issues
  • eSIM not supported

Fairphone 2

  • Camera app hangs after first video recording after boot, recording is stored though

As always mal released a very well working version and i can use my Fairphone4 as daily driver (not requiring android apps :wink:).
If anyone have an info to the above (or potential new) problems feel free to post it here or at the SailfishOS forum.

So, many thanks to mal for the fine work :smiley:.

14 Likes

Hi,

Some guys tried SailfishOS on a Fairphone ? If yes, what did you think ?

Thanks

I briefly tried Sailfish on a Fairphone 2 in 2017 out of curiosity.
It was usable and the consistent gesture UI was very interesting at the time, but as it was a community port it was missing Android App compatibility, and the home screen was not very customisable back then (don’t know about now).

3 Likes

Seeing some movement on this topic, I checked the sailfish forum and I discovered that “alpha2” version was released 25 days ago :partying_face:

5 Likes

As @Coke2625 describes - SailfishOS for the Fairphones 2,4 and 5 are all community ports.
They did not have android support (may be waydroid will work sooner or later).
On FP4 there could be a problem with SMS depending on the provider you have.
On FP5 there is a problem with wlan if WPA2 and WPA3 is enabled as the FritzBox have it per default.
All other apps i need work well except Whisperfish (a signal client build by the community). This have a connection problem since a few days. It seams that there is a protocoll change/enhancement(?).

3 Likes

Thanks, but I just wanted to know if anyone had tried this OS to get some feedback.

Yes, i tried it and use it as a daily driver. For an alpha2 Port it works very good
(like all Releases by @mal )

Meanwhile i updated to the last 5.0.0.68 version.
VoLTE works with additional packge
Web browsing, Email, Telegram over Fernschreiber or Yottagram work,
youtube works with microTube (uTube)
Camera works fine

There are some bugs with codecs, so playing video result in hanging after 1 Sec. of playing.
@mal will try to debug this Problem.

As a verdict = for alpha2 = very good!

2 Likes

Thanks for reminding that the VoLTE package is not installed by default, I should add it to be installed by default since it seems to be working reasonably well.

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Same here, we have three FP4 here and using them as only mobile devices - with the restriction not having (and not need) android apps :wink:.
There are a few minor problems (e.g. connecting/reconnection bluetooth devices not working without some restarts of the services, and a missing ring tone during phone call connection being established).
But all other Apps and functions wee use works very well :slight_smile:.

4 Likes

Thanks for this.

But: has anybody experience with android apps on Sailfish OS? I will need some of of them - if I change to it.

I tried installing Waydroid on FP4’s SailfishOS but without success…
So until this is eventually fixed, no Android app on Sailfish I’m afraid…

Note that Waydroid is working on UbuntuTouch for the same FP4 :slight_smile:

2 Likes

Just curious which version of Waydroid did you try? I assume there will be manual changes needed anyway based on my earlier investigations, I haven’t yet tried the newest Waydroid version (lineage-20 based).

Hi @mal !

I’m using waydroid --version 1.4.3 with the default images, namely:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/waydroid/files/images/system/lineage/waydroid_arm64/lineage-18.1-20250531-VANILLA-waydroid_arm64-system.zip/download
https://sourceforge.net/projects/waydroid/files/images/vendor/waydroid_arm64/lineage-18.1-20250531-MAINLINE-waydroid_arm64-vendor.zip/download

Then when launching

 waydroid show-full-ui
[17:53:29] Failed to get service waydroidplatform, trying again...
[17:53:31] Failed to get service waydroidplatform, trying again...

Following this post I then tried the LineageOS 20 images:

images_url=https://sourceforge.net/projects/aleasto-lineageos/files/LineageOS%2020/waydroid_arm64

I downloaded it manually to my PC and copied/pasted it to my FP4 devices under /home/waydroid/images/, but I’m still getting the same error.

Please feel free to ask if you would like more details. :slight_smile:
Olivier

1 Like

Thx!

So no need to try it out.