Sailfish: Life After Symbian, Harmattan, Maemo

Since MWC 2013, Jolla and Sailfish have been making oceanic size waves of movement forward in the right direction on target for their proposed release dates later this year and the Sailfish OS is looking as innovative and slick as ever.

It’s dawning on me that Sailfish has a clear advantage over some other rivals in attracting a new following and that is clearly in the form of applications or “DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS”.

Let’s break down Sailfish and the proposed application environment:

1/ Runs Android Apps out of the box: TICK

2/ Runs HTML Apps: TICK

3/ Runs Qt apps with minimal port effort: TICK

So Jolla have gone with the notion that covering all bases is better than for example going with one option for developers which I tend to agree.

Lets look at the options then starting off with the Android App compatibility.

Sailfish has the ability to run Android apps in a way much like BB10 – like BB10, yes, they may not be 100% integrated (ie. sandbox fashion) with the ecosystem as say an Android app running on an Android phone, but at least it offers the customer this added functionality.   Plus, as the Sailfish OS spreads, there will be more incentive for Android app makers to then fully customise and port their app for full Sailfish experience later on – being Linux-based also, this should be a painless exercise.

HTML app compatibility is also there and of course is expected.

The big one however is all the apps that were lovingly made for Symbian, Harmattan and Maemo with no homes to go to.  Of these, there are literally thousands upon thousands of apps that have been around for some time now, but with no future continuation for any of those platforms what can the developers do ?   Well the answer is simple, that Sailfish, being Qt based is the obvious evolution or next step for all those apps and app makers alike.   We have heard recently that it took one developer two hours to port one of his Harmattan apps to Sailfish!

The advantage of getting pure Qt apps from Symbian, Harmattan and Maemo running on the Sailfish OS is that unlike with the Android sandbox versions, these can easily be fully baked into the OS and so will work well with for example the pulley menu’s unlike the Android ‘sandbox’ experience.   With many of the big name apps (skype, whatsapp, youtube, viber, firefox, iplayer, angry birds etc etc) already available on these platforms, this is really an exciting prospect!

Sailfish naturally will become the new home to all of these abandoned app makers who have felt left out in the cold for all this time and moreso will make a match made in Sailfish/Qt/Linux heaven.  Amen.

So with that said: ‘calling Qt developers, Qt developers, Qt developers’, look no further – your future is here with Jolla and the Sailfish OS – please pull up a chair and we promise you’ll feel right at home.  :-)

For more information and to get started, please head on over to https://sailfishos.org//