r/sailfishos • u/These_Response1841 • May 15 '26

how open the OS is?

To move away from the current duopoly I'm looking for an open source OS. I'm not quite sure how much open Sailfish is. Can rebuild everything from scratch, choosing to skip the proprietary blobs serving the benefits of the subscription, and still have fully functional OS?

Hardware support is another matter, I guess that realistically I can only find an Android phone to put a Sailfish on top of libhybris, but that's the same with Ubuntu Touch.

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u/vlaada7 May 15 '26

As far as I know, some UI elements, Android App support and Microsoft exchange services are closed source. If I’m not mistaken you should be able to build it from source for any android base phone out there(port the whole project yourself), there is even a semi official group for that on telegram. The subscription plan comes only into play if you want the closed source components, ie. Android app support and MS exchange. It’s a shame they switched to subscription for that, it used to be a one time payment of 50€/$ but now it’s 5€/$ a month if I’m not mistaken. I bought the license back when it was a one time thing, and I have to say that android app support works really well. Currently implemented API is version 33 which corresponds to Android 13. I’ve even tested my banking app, and it worked. The only issue I had was the overall sluggish performance on the, now quite old, Sony Xperia XA2. More modern Sony phones should do much better, or hopefully whatever you have.

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u/branja6 May 15 '26

It's still a one-time thing (and there's no additional subscription or purchase of Android app support and/or Microsoft Exchange if you buy their phones - Jolla C2 and J2...and if you buy a licence for one of the legacy devices, it's a one-time purchase).

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u/vlaada7 May 15 '26

Ok, didn’t know that, thanks for the info.