First month of using a Jolla phone
It’s been only a month since I got my new Jolla phone and there is a lot of progress on pretty much everything I wrote about on my previous blog post – apart from hearing from Jolla’s support team, they seem to be quite heavily backlogged. I’m not complaining quite yet, it’s a small company and they’re struggling to ramp up to meet their demand.
I started exploring the treasure trove called OpenRepos and found a bunch of nice native apps I wasn’t aware of before. I now have a native Jabber client called Livewire, a native Matrix client called xmatic, and even a native Telegram client called RooTelegram. On the Telegram side, there’s also Yottagram, which in general works much better but it still lacks a couple of features that are heavily used in a couple of groups I’m in. I also found Musikilo, a music player which does exactly what I want: shuffle-play a directory! The same app can even connect to my Lyrion server and let me control playback from even the phone’s lock screen. There’s even Helmsman, a native Home Assistant client whose location tracking works better than the non-Google official app. All in all, I’ve found almost all I need in terms of native apps, and their quality is comparable to or even better than I’ve been using in Android.
On the Japanese input side, the new version of the FUTO keyboard support Japanese input, even in flick mode! It works reasonably well. Personal Ringtones was updated for the newest SailfishOS version and now just works. And I even got Viber to work by tricking it to log in as a tablet – I still need to log into my Android client once every two weeks, but that’s much better than before.
On the Gadgetbridge side, I tried getting in touch with the developer of Rockbridge in order to get replying to messages to work, but it seems to be quite involved and hackish. However, I saw that the development version of Amazfish has an experimental Garmin support. Given that Amazfish has the foundational work and UI part already done, that seems to me like a better way forward.
And so I’ve slowly started scratching my own itches. It’s still a long process, especially on the Garmin side, but we’re getting there! For the last month I’ve been using my Jolla phone as my main/exclusive device (apart from the mandatory turn-on-Viber-every-weekend), and I’m happy with how well it works.
As for issues, I think right now my biggest issue is that the apparent buggy implementation of the USB-C charging negotiation protocol (to be fair, I heard it’s some 300-page monster). I have found issues with several of my chargers, especially when I have two USB-C devices connected to the same charger. Given the reproducibility of this issue, I should really gather and submit some more logs, but I keep postponing that.