A $150 Linux Phone with Android App Support? Sony XA2 & Sailfish OS X

so linux phones have been all the rage in the past you know a couple of years furious has finally started selling their librium 5 to the masses back in november and pine 64 also finally started selling their pine phone back in july but here's the thing as a mere mortal even now there's almost no way you can get your hands on one of these libra five costs a whopping eight hundred dollars and the shipping time according to the uh purist website is about a few months and if that wasn't enough if you don't live in the us you'll also have to pay the custom fees and at this point librium 5 doesn't seem like that good of a deal not that it did in the first place but i digress and when it comes to pine phone well it's been out of stock on the official website for a while now and i was only able to find one phone on the used marketplace for about twice the price but what if i told you that you can buy a linux phone right now for less than 150 bucks and i'm not talking about a fun toy for experiments i'm talking actual daily driver material a phone that is actually capable of everything that you expect from a smartphone like calls sms apps whatsapp telegram instagram and so on a phone with an actually decent battery life they can also run android apps seems almost too good to be true right well it isn't this phone exists you can buy it right now and it has a name sony x82 with salesforce os x 4.0 and today we're going to see if this can be your next linux phone but first i'd like to address the elephant in the room i can already hear a lot of you asking something along the lines of but wolfgang android is based on linux kernel so technically half the world is running linux on their phone how is salefish os pine phone or librium 5 any difference well that's a great question yes android is indeed based on linux kernel but that's where similarities with desktop distros like ubuntu debian and fedora end unlike your run-of-the-mill desktop linux distro android doesn't run new utilities doesn't use x or wayland as his display server doesn't use systemd run its openrc or any other popular init system and doesn't have a traditional package manager with repositories and dependencies android's user interface and all of its apps are written in java or kotlin and they don't use any of the popular linux toolkits like gtk or qts moreover if you want to run an android app in your linux box you will actually have to use para virtualization software like andbox so yes even though technically linux is not an operating system but a kernel for simplicity's sake i will refer to all the phones that run android as android phones and all the other linux based phones as linux phones now that we have this out of the way let's get started with the video first let's talk about the phone itself sony xperia x8 was released back in 2018 when sony smartphones were actually relevant it has three gigs of ram a 5.2 inch screen with full hd resolution and snapdragon 630 soc nowadays these specs wouldn't blow anyone's mind and even back then they were pretty mediocre that being said the phone handles all of the typical smartphone tasks very well without feeling too sluggish all in all it's a decent phone nothing special what really sets this phone apart from all the budget android smartphones though is the ability to run a linux district called sailfish os x which was made by a finnish company called jola sailfish is mostly focused on corporate environments where people don't want to trust either android or ios with the sensitive employee data but you can also just flash salefish os on your phone after you buy the sailfish os x license that's right buy because sailfish os x costs 50 euros but you can also get the free version which doesn't include android app emulation or predictive keyboard inputs installing sailfish os x on your phone might be a little bit difficult than installing ubuntu or debian on your desktop but if you've ever installed linux os or any other custom android rom you'll feel right at home here because the process is very similar jolie has a pretty detailed guide on how to do everything on their website though so i will link that down below fair warning though unlocking the bootloader and installing salesforce os on your phone will obviously void your warranty so make sure that stuff like calls sms wi-fi and all of this stuff works on your phone before doing any of that since i made my first video about salesforce os back in 2018 very little has changed sailfish os x 4.0 looks very neat in polish in fact i'll go as far as to say it looks better than like a good half of oem android roms yes i'm looking at you huawei sailfish also features a gestures based navigation which actually predates the gestures based ux on ios and android for example you can swipe from the side to minimize the application swipe from the top left or top right to close it and swipe from the bottom to open the app drawer all in all even after three years salesfish os looks pretty much as neat and polished as stock android which is normally not something you would expect from an operating system that has a market share so small that i couldn't actually find any information about it seriously i don't know how many people run salesfish os it's probably less than 0.1 percent sure there is some janky stuff and the ui is a little bit rougher on the edges in some parts for example there is no haptic feedback when your fingerprint doesn't get recognized correctly and some animations are a little bit laggy but oh no let's say it's definitely usable now as i already mentioned i've reviewed salesforce os back in 2018 and as an android user the app situation was pretty disappointing back then i pretty much had to rely on android emulation entirely for apps like telegram whatsapp and all the other social messaging apps and unfortunately for proprietary apps such as instagram whatsapp snapchat and facebook that's still the case however salefish now also has very good clients for telegram signal and twitter salesfashio 3.3 has also introduced native next cloud integration which works very well not something you can say about android that being said jolo's official app store is pretty much useless for anything but default and standard apps if you want to get the newest versions of all of your favorite programs you'll have to install an app called store man store man is basically an alternative app store kind of like cydia on iphones but for sailfish that's basically where you'll be getting the majority of the apps from and i wish there was an easy way to install storming but unfortunately for now there is no other way but to do it through the command line which is not ideal considering it's a phone in any case once you install storm and you will have access to a pretty big repository of apps and that's especially surprising considering how obscure a platform sailfish was is i was able to find apps for telegram twitter signal a book reader a music player a spotify client a youtube player and even a reddit client and all of those apps work reasonably well for daily use and while if you can't find a native app that you need you can always turn to android emulation sailfish has had android app support for a while now and for sony xa2 devices the android version was bumped from the ancient 4.4.4 to a fairly modern 8.1 the emulator technology that sailfish uses is called alien dalvik and it works fairly well i've tried some popular apps like instagram whatsapp and spotify they don't run fast by any means but they do run mostly i definitely wouldn't expect some apps like netflix snapchat pokemon go and some banking apps to run on sailfish since those apps are super picky about the us and refuse to run on custom roms and rooted devices i was also able to run the bit warden app just fine although without the autofill functionality now that we've talked about the advantages let's talk about stuff that isn't so great about sailfish os the most obvious thing is of course the fact that sailfish os is not entirely open source jola actually has a very handy diagram on their website which shows which components of sailfish os are open sourced and which aren't and as you can see a lot of the stuff such as ui or android accumulation backend are actually closed source which might be an issue for you if you're looking for a replacement for closed source operating systems i'll refrain from any moral judgment when it comes to open source versus closed source and instead stick to practical arguments the thing is let's say hypothetically both jola and purism go down suddenly nobody's developing apps for it anymore nobody's pushing updates nobody's committing to the code nada [Music] in one of those cases the community is going to be able to pick up from where developers left off and basically develop the us further just writing new apps you know pushing updates and so on and the other platform is just going to die because there is nothing to contribute to if half of the code is closed source unless of course jola decides to open source everything before going down which might happen who knows and looking at the market share for sale officials smartphones or rather lack thereof it's not entirely implausible to imagine that one day jolo will decide that you know developing an operating system that nobody uses is not worth it so the long-term availability is definitely something to consider when you're choosing a linux phone to buy one of the best features of phones like librarian 5 and pine phone are hardware switches which can disable wi-fi lte modem camera or microphone on the hardware level privacy is one of the main reasons why people are looking for alternatives to ios and android and so having those functions being able to you know disable all the privacy invading functionality on the hardware level is definitely a big advantage needless to say jola doesn't actually make the phones anymore it's sony making them and sony phones are just your generic run-of-the-mill smartphones with no fancy functionality like hardware switches for wi-fi and you know lte and so on moreover both librarian 5 and pine phone can be easily disassembled and a lot of the components can be easily replaced or repaired you can also actually take the batteries out and pine phone i think accepts very common type of batteries like samsung j5 type batteries or something you can very easily buy those on ebay and other websites but you can't do the same thing on sony phones obviously because sony phones are just like any modern phone glued shot with no user serviceable parts and then last but not least both library 5 and pine phone can be connected to an external monitor keyboard and mouse and used just like a regular desktop pc of course they wouldn't be very fast they wouldn't be as fast as a desktop pc but still for something like you know very lightweight office work maybe some gaming like you know solitaire or minesweeper they would do just fine i've tried connecting my sony x82 to the external monitor via usb type-c but that doesn't seem to be support unfortunately keyboard works though so there's that and last but not least if i really had to nitpick i would say that even though sailfish os feels very you know neat polished and daily drivable there is still some you know some things here and there that don't seem as polished as you know let's say android or ios sometimes the phone is too slow to wake up sometimes it doesn't recognize your fingerprint android apps are kind of sluggish and the battery life doesn't seem to be quite as good as on android there is also no possibility to record your screen at all and worst of all new fetch wouldn't even run on sale fish was by default because it comes with busy box ash and not you know full-fledged gnu bash so you have to install that first i know right absolutely terrible so yeah just a lot of little problems here and there that you might not even notice if you decide to pick up this phone and install sailfish os on it so now let's talk about what makes this phone so attractive for people who are looking into you know getting a linux smartphone first and foremost the price i got my xa2 from a local marketplace for 65 euros which is about 80 and although this particular model had seen better days you can find those for about 100 to 120 dollars in pretty good condition on your local marketplace like craigslist ebay or olx and there is literally no catch this phone doesn't have any glaring qc issues it doesn't explode in your pocket it's just a very mediocre phone by all standards and android phones especially budget ones don't have the best resale value i mean this phone used to cost 200 dollars when it came out so it's not that surprising that the price is so low now you'll also have to pay 45 bucks for the salefish osx license which brings the total cost of this phone to about 140 dollars which is still cheaper than pine phone and much cheaper than librium five i mean hell you can buy five of those for the price of one library five and if one of them breaks you still have four of them to go and who knows by the time all five of them break pine phone and librium five might actually be usable on a daily basis which brings me to my next argument for xperia xa2 and sailfish os x and that is the current state of linux phones to keep it short everything else currently in the market is even worse first i want to make one thing very clear having a possibility of running full-fledged open source linux on a phone is great be that a complete new product like librium 5 or pine phone or an aftermarket operating system like post market os or ub ports it's been a long time coming and thanks to companies like furious 64 and thanks to all the independent developers we can now buy a phone that runs a full-fledged linux district like debian or manjaro now that being said although the new developments on that front are really exciting linux on smartphones is still in its infancy desktop environments like plasma mobile or flash are still in a stage of early development have tons of bugs and a big part of functionality that we take for granted on android and ios smartphones is either missing or isn't implemented properly yet when it comes to the app support it's not looking good either most of the third-party apps are basically the same apps that you run on your desktop linux just compiled for arm most of the time those apps aren't adapted or optimized for mobile phones they expect a mouse input and a landscape screen so even if in theory you should be able to run any linux app that was compiled for the architecture that your phone uses in reality the overwhelming majority of apps end up having a broken ui or being completely unusable the hardware side of things is not looking good either one of the reasons why librium 5 is so expensive despite pretty modest specs is the fact that most of its hardware like camera and wifi adapter runs open source firmware since this kind of hardware isn't as popular among the vendors it couldn't be mass produced as efficiently and as cheaply as your typical android phone parts it also means that purism had to write their own drivers from scratch for a lot of the onboard hardware the developers are doing all they can to improve the user experience but unfortunately writing drivers from scratch is hard and takes time for example here's the progress on camera driver from periods websites after many weeks of experimentation the peers and developers managed to get the first recognizable images from the front image sensor at 640 by 480 resolution on february 17 2021. there has been a lot of progress on making the image sensors work at higher resolutions but camera focusing does not yet work even something as basic as calls doesn't always work very well users and developers report issues such as cellular network switches to 2g during calls effectively cutting the internet access the caller on the other end can hear themselves because there is currently no echo cancellation of any kind the voice sounds muffled because the phone software still captures audio from both microphones and so on and so forth now i'm not going to nitpick every single issue and problem with librium 5 or pine phone smartphones and i'm also not trying to belittle mock or insult the developers or companies that work in those products but we have to be realistic neither labrum 5 nor pine phone can realistically replace an android or ios smartphone at the moment of filming this video right now even the essential functionalities such as calls camera text messages wi-fi hotspot file management or web browsing are either non-existent or don't work very well and chances are it's going to take a few more years until that's fixed but until then i think sailfish os paired with a cheap sony phone like this one is a very good and very accessible way to get into linux smartphones you can maybe get it as a second device at first just play around with it see if all of your essential android apps can run on it and who knows maybe eventually it will replace your main device of course it wouldn't for me because i am pretty happy with my current phone but if you're really dedicated to breaking up with google or apple you might want to give this a try so yeah that's going to be it for this video thank you guys for watching and as usual i do want to thank my patrons tim trey bobcock mitchell valentino raypuria rose user number g64 and everyone else who supports this channel thank you guys for watching once again and i'll see you in the next one goodbye

Channel: Wolfgang's Channel

Views: 72,775

Rating: 4.9265966 out of 5

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Id: GbYPoiZh8wg

Length: 16min 1sec (961 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 24 2021