Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

I totally agree an that. Isn't that a shame? And really why's that so? Why wasn't it possible to keep the good things along with all the good stuff which came afterwards?

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

You know that in the jolla community noone - NO ONE - wants ads, right?

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

True - but people inside this community are edge cases. I know from having published Android apps - 90% of people out there choose the ad-supported model than a fully paid-up one.

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

For the love of $deity no adds! Paying for support ? Yeah, sure no problem.

But any sort of ads is a very very bad idea on a mobile device - its enough that most of Android is made almost unusable by annoying and obtrusive adds occupying the limited screen space, so don't bring this plague to Sailfish OS.

Actually if there is something that Sailfish OS did right its not having any adds anywhere.

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

That took how long - 5 minutes? ;)

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

I said have a paid and ad-supported option (cause most people are freeloaders)! Revenue needs to come from somewhere.

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

Just some further thoughts on how Sailfish can be made a success.

Cyanogen are in a remarkably similar situation to Jolla. They are a tiny company (only 90 employees) with negligible revenue (but financial backing of investors). However, they have their OS running on 50 million devices now. It's because they have this widespread adoption, that they can now start looking at deals to monetize the product (manufacturers are coming to them to use their OS, Microsoft are paying them to put their services on the OS, etc.). Where Jolla differ in all this is that they have an OS (technically better than Cyanogen, also not dependent on Android and Google), however the mass adoption is just not there, hence no one really cares. Whether it's Jolla or someone else, the immediate goal should be to completely open the source of Sailfish. If they open the source like Cyanogen did (90k contributors to the project), developers will come and will contribute. With developer interest, the burden of development can be spread (and for free). With the developer interest, the community will get a product they be more engaged in, that will drive increased adoption. It's only with that increased adoption that further innovation can take place.

The irony in the Cyanogen story is that what initially made them a success (being open to outsiders) is the very model that they are now trying to kill as the company has now gone private.

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

Cyanogen is not very good comparison to Jolla, as they build on top of Android, which is developed in many other places with considerable amount of manpower and resources. On the other hand, just by open sourcing everything doesn't mean it's going to fly. Sailfish would still face the same challenges as it does today.

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

If your application is good enough, people will pay for it. The people who wouldn't pay for it, would never have paid for it, and would figure out a way around the ads anyway. If they don't know how to do it themselves, they'll ask someone else to do it for them. If you can't make a living by developing applications without ads, maybe you should develop applications in your spare time and find a new (read: real) job.

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

I think you have too technically oriented friends.

There is a lot of people out there who don't even have adblockers on their browsers. Do you think those people hack their phones to get rid of ads when installing simple browser plugin is too much? Actually they don't even know it is possible to get rid of those ads, and to me it looks like they are ok with them.