First, it is not European alternative - it is Finnish. _Europe_ is not a single country. I will keep reminding about that.
Second, don't really care. Any political actor, be it state or super-state actor like EU, that is serious about tech sovereignty should start subsidizing its own tech sector and properly fund domestic R&D to create truly independent solutions, and pass law to legally oblige all its institutions to support these solutions. I may be sympathetic to the idea, but some Linux-based smartphone is in practice useless to me if the main government app in my country only supports Android and iOS, and my banking app requires Google Play Services.
Folks, tech sovereignty is a political decision, not a consumer choice. Start making demands on your leaders, as their sole purpose is to make policies and this is why they live off your taxes. Do not satisfy yourself with empty consumer gestures.
Nokia N900 was really great, Jolla has some of the former team people.
I only jumped into Android after my Symbian phone died, and by then Symbian Belle, with QT and PIPS (PIPS Is POSIX on Symbian OS), it was already shapping great.
What does full-stack mean here?
Phone is fully produced in Europe?
Software and online storage fully provided by European company?
edit: I want this phone, I have reserved a slot in the coming batch.
Just posing as an average Joe here, someone who does not host their own storage, calendar, contacts, phone tracking, remote wipe, the "free" features Google and Apple are known for on their phones.
Usually 'full stack' just means software. Here it means a true Linux phone (Sailfish OS) plus Android compatibility with sandboxing. The C2 model is made in Turkey from Asian parts. The new phone is manufactured in Asia, but the final assembly, QA, and software flashing are done in Finland.
This isn't for people with a consumer mindset. It’s for people who want a Linux computer in their pocket, more privacy, and still want to run some Android apps.
There are phones that can run "true Linux" out there, and there even are ports of Sailfish OS for some of them, but Jolla phones were never part of those and rely on Android drivers instead.
But even the full software stack isn't European as it runs on a Mediatek platform (ie. all the cellular stack and platform software is from Mediatek, which is from Taiwan). It's the apps software stack on top of the Linux kernel that is potentially "European".
There are no longer any cellular chipset vendors based in Europe, afaik, so there's really no alternative. It's also hard to see how they will ever again be one.
It's both; the one I mentioned is for system drivers, the one you're talking about is for running applications (which you can also do on a regular non-Halium GNU/Linux using e.g. Waydroid).
Smartphone apps have unfortunately become a hard requirement for basic day-to-day activities. Most companies offer them only for iOS and Android.
If your smartphone can't run the vast majority of apps, it is basically dead on arrival. Nobody is going to buy it when they need to carry another phone anyways.
The only way around this is either emulation (which Google is trying very hard to sabotage) or heavy-handed regulation forcing app developers to also support niche platforms. I don't think either option is likely to work.
They don’t need to specifically support “niche platforms,” which will never happen anyway. They just need to support the one, universal platform every device (be it phone, laptop or desktop) can always access, the web.
And they don't want to, because that experiment ran for around 20 years and resoundingly failed. Turns out it's really hard to stop the bottom quintile of users from entering all their credentials into just about any website that looks similar to what they are used to - and then their identity/money is just gone.
Stopping those users without a trusted authority deciding which electron-wrapped websites are genuine is an unsolved problem, I think.
I noticed that the orders hasn't bumped up that much since this was shared last time. Not really sure I see the growth here is showing a lot of demand for a European smartphone - although I could totally be wrong given the geopolitical situation.
Well done, congratulations. My next phone will certainly be European to the root. Will be nice to come preinstalled with some free European (apps, socials and video hosting, like Vivaldi browser, HugstonOne local AI, Protonmail, Libreoffice, w-social, vimeo, mastodon, lemmy etc.
That definitely seems to be the better alternative amongst all others. While I appreciate all the energy put into graphene or lineage it appears to me like way too much energy for Half baked solutions. Depending on google good will in the future too. I can understand them as hack, not that much as industrial proposals.
This is the third phone on the HN main page. I’m happy to see this flurry of work at real competition in the market, but I hope the companies can survive and respond to CSVEs.
Yeah but the core issue is that all apps for digital services for both private and government, at least in my EU country, are only shipped for the iOS/Android duopoly.
So having yet another 100th FOSS linux phone that won't run those apps is pointless until apps for these phones are shipped with feature parity, and they probably won't get shipped until these phones reach some critical mass adoption, and they won't get critical mass adoption because they don't run the popular apps.
If this is similar to LineageOS, then it's always potentially only a matter of time until some banking and payment apps stop working due to failing security attestation pushed by a Google update.
We need native apps that pass attestation out of the box for that phone/OS, not relying on hacks that may or may not work in the future.
This is not good UX and it poisons the well if you push users to a new platform then they discover some apps don't work as you promised.
Your point seems to be "Some Jolla phones can run some Android apps," while GP's issue is that "It's not true that all Jolla phones can run all Android apps."
Other comments have links to more details, but in short: do not support this company.
It was to be expected that a lot of corps will want to milk the term "EU sovereignty" and good willed naive people who don't look inside the packaging.
You're probably responding because of the Jolla tablet :)
To be fair, the Jolla tablet was in 2015, more than 10 years ago. Most probably, many of the people working at Jolla are not the same as then. Also, if you read carefully all the announcements and communication from Jolla, you can easily see they have learned from that crowdfunding affair. This is not the same offer, not in a long mile.
That and the russian ties, the partially closed source OS, the locked bootloader, the $50 device reset fee, the cheap underpowered chinese chipset. The company was sold more than once between investment firms. Yet it presents itself like a happy independent open source collective.
The firm with partly russian ownership went bankrupt a couple of years ago. The russian fork of the software lives on as AuroraOS in their local market but the current Jolla has no ties to russia.
That's fair, but in my experience for many people the camera and/or battery are the main reasons to upgrade to a new phone (Also the reason why the presentations focus on the camera for a big chunk of time usually I'd guess) so if they want to compete with that it makes sense to have a decent camera.
It is enabled by smartphone reviewers excluding it from thickness measurements. I bet camera bumps would be a lot less prominent if they were clearly represented.
This project has been going for years. Good to see it lives on.
IMO there's a paradox with these privacy-focused mobile solutions. Just as with the expensive flagship corporate devices, the massive price tags suggest an assumption that we are doing all our computing on mobile. That's now the case for most normies. But for anyone who really cares about their privacy (not to mention sanity), there's a better solution available: repatriate most of one's computing to a laptop. At which point all these mobile devices become unjustifiably expensive. Hence the paradox.
PS: downvoting a reasoned opinion, apart from being lazy and toxic in any community, does not constitute a rebuttal.
huge notch and huge bottom bezel with mediocre Mediatek Dimensity 7100, all this for 650EUR with specs worse than 200EUR phones, that's like 450EUR for software, a bit high surcharge...
The notch is a bit silly, given that you have the bezel at the bottom, but I guess it could be ergonomics.
I believe the phone is designed around feedback for customers/potential customers. Which tells me that other people have very different phone usage from my own. I would have asked for a much smaller phone and a €200 price tag. The processor and even a shitty camera doesn't really bother me. I just want a cheap phone that can run like five apps (sadly one is the type that won't work, i.e. payments), and not run Android or iOS.
It's what you get when you have no phone manufacturing supply chains anymore because you shipped them all to China 20+ years ago then lost the OS wars to Apple and Google leaving you with no local phone industry. Then it's gonna cost you through the nose when you're making, what are now to your industry, niche low volume items.
Remember when you could buy EU made Nokias, Siemens and Ericssons? Even the chargers were made in Finland back then.
>As ex-Nokia, I can tell quite a few stories about the rampdown in Germany, of factories and R&D sites, merge with Siemens and what not.
Well go on, don't leave us hanging. This would be very interesting to hear.
>For those that care, search the news for strikes or layoffs, around the time iOS/Android were taking off.
Well, according to my google-fu, the factory closures from Finland and germany were relocated to Hungary and Romania, so still EU, therefore the EU could have maintained a domestic phone manufacturing sector as well if they had kept those and not close them down as well to move everything to china.
Everything about this screams of corporate greed and mismanagement on Nokia's part, way before Microsoft entered the picture.
I dislike the board that brought Elop in, and promised him a bonus if he managed to sell Nokia Mobiles business unit, and they were also the ones that decided to off-shore factories and R&D into Eastern Europe and India.
What does MS have to do with this? The Nokia factory shuffling and strikes GP was mentioning happened before MS took over.
And people love to blame MS but Nokia was a sinking ship already by that point. MS was just a new captain added to steer the Titanic but the same fate was inevitable, as its home grown MeeGo/Maemo platform arrived too late and to too little adoption to stand a chance against the already established iOS and Android platforms who were throwing infinity money on becoming the undisputed mobile duopoly platforms, selling 10x as many devices as Nokia was selling Maemo N900s. It was already over for Nokia by that point same as it was for Blackberry. Nokia's own engineers admitted this the moment they got to play with the first iPhone at their Espoo HQ.
That's like blaming a drunk driver for hitting a guy that previously shot himself in the head.
Nothing MS could have done would have changed that fate for the better. WHat did people expect MS to have done?
I think of those two, the OS wars is the much more substantial EU/US difference. It's not like Apple is making much hardware in the US, yet they wade in pools of cash.
what good cameras? all I see is "Sony" without mentioning chip, even cheap phones like Poco X7 Pro or similar have nowadays comparable cameras as what they claim
Second, don't really care. Any political actor, be it state or super-state actor like EU, that is serious about tech sovereignty should start subsidizing its own tech sector and properly fund domestic R&D to create truly independent solutions, and pass law to legally oblige all its institutions to support these solutions. I may be sympathetic to the idea, but some Linux-based smartphone is in practice useless to me if the main government app in my country only supports Android and iOS, and my banking app requires Google Play Services.
Folks, tech sovereignty is a political decision, not a consumer choice. Start making demands on your leaders, as their sole purpose is to make policies and this is why they live off your taxes. Do not satisfy yourself with empty consumer gestures.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45785840
I only jumped into Android after my Symbian phone died, and by then Symbian Belle, with QT and PIPS (PIPS Is POSIX on Symbian OS), it was already shapping great.
That Burning Memo was really a downer.
edit: I want this phone, I have reserved a slot in the coming batch.
Just posing as an average Joe here, someone who does not host their own storage, calendar, contacts, phone tracking, remote wipe, the "free" features Google and Apple are known for on their phones.
This isn't for people with a consumer mindset. It’s for people who want a Linux computer in their pocket, more privacy, and still want to run some Android apps.
There are no longer any cellular chipset vendors based in Europe, afaik, so there's really no alternative. It's also hard to see how they will ever again be one.
Smartphone apps have unfortunately become a hard requirement for basic day-to-day activities. Most companies offer them only for iOS and Android.
If your smartphone can't run the vast majority of apps, it is basically dead on arrival. Nobody is going to buy it when they need to carry another phone anyways.
The only way around this is either emulation (which Google is trying very hard to sabotage) or heavy-handed regulation forcing app developers to also support niche platforms. I don't think either option is likely to work.
Stopping those users without a trusted authority deciding which electron-wrapped websites are genuine is an unsolved problem, I think.
should work for banking and governmental applications, especially as those should already have the workflow in place to support niche platforms.
https://sailfishos.wiki/books/compatibility-list-of-android-...
[1] https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/jolla-phone-update-lights-on-...
So having yet another 100th FOSS linux phone that won't run those apps is pointless until apps for these phones are shipped with feature parity, and they probably won't get shipped until these phones reach some critical mass adoption, and they won't get critical mass adoption because they don't run the popular apps.
https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/banking-apps-on-sailfish-os/1...
We need native apps that pass attestation out of the box for that phone/OS, not relying on hacks that may or may not work in the future.
This is not good UX and it poisons the well if you push users to a new platform then they discover some apps don't work as you promised.
It was to be expected that a lot of corps will want to milk the term "EU sovereignty" and good willed naive people who don't look inside the packaging.
To be fair, the Jolla tablet was in 2015, more than 10 years ago. Most probably, many of the people working at Jolla are not the same as then. Also, if you read carefully all the announcements and communication from Jolla, you can easily see they have learned from that crowdfunding affair. This is not the same offer, not in a long mile.
The original iPhone SE was the last time I enjoyed a phone’s design.
Also, as an italian, Jolla reminds me a lot of the word "Ciolla", which you can only guess what it's a slang for. That doesn't help.
IMO there's a paradox with these privacy-focused mobile solutions. Just as with the expensive flagship corporate devices, the massive price tags suggest an assumption that we are doing all our computing on mobile. That's now the case for most normies. But for anyone who really cares about their privacy (not to mention sanity), there's a better solution available: repatriate most of one's computing to a laptop. At which point all these mobile devices become unjustifiably expensive. Hence the paradox.
PS: downvoting a reasoned opinion, apart from being lazy and toxic in any community, does not constitute a rebuttal.
It is absolutely not. More than misleading title.
People are jumping on this "EU sovereignty" thing band-wagon and milking it for all it's worth.
Could you elaborate? Just disagreeing without explaining why doesn’t contribute to the discussion.
I believe the phone is designed around feedback for customers/potential customers. Which tells me that other people have very different phone usage from my own. I would have asked for a much smaller phone and a €200 price tag. The processor and even a shitty camera doesn't really bother me. I just want a cheap phone that can run like five apps (sadly one is the type that won't work, i.e. payments), and not run Android or iOS.
https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io
https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices#Community
you can certainly buy some of the supported smaller devices (e.g. Pixel 3a) and change battery for new
sadly basically nothing newer than 2020
Remember when you could buy EU made Nokias, Siemens and Ericssons? Even the chargers were made in Finland back then.
For those that care, search the news for strikes or layoffs, around the time iOS/Android were taking off.
Well go on, don't leave us hanging. This would be very interesting to hear.
>For those that care, search the news for strikes or layoffs, around the time iOS/Android were taking off.
Well, according to my google-fu, the factory closures from Finland and germany were relocated to Hungary and Romania, so still EU, therefore the EU could have maintained a domestic phone manufacturing sector as well if they had kept those and not close them down as well to move everything to china.
Everything about this screams of corporate greed and mismanagement on Nokia's part, way before Microsoft entered the picture.
And people love to blame MS but Nokia was a sinking ship already by that point. MS was just a new captain added to steer the Titanic but the same fate was inevitable, as its home grown MeeGo/Maemo platform arrived too late and to too little adoption to stand a chance against the already established iOS and Android platforms who were throwing infinity money on becoming the undisputed mobile duopoly platforms, selling 10x as many devices as Nokia was selling Maemo N900s. It was already over for Nokia by that point same as it was for Blackberry. Nokia's own engineers admitted this the moment they got to play with the first iPhone at their Espoo HQ.
That's like blaming a drunk driver for hitting a guy that previously shot himself in the head.
Nothing MS could have done would have changed that fate for the better. WHat did people expect MS to have done?