In Sailfish OS 1, cover actions were triggered by a swipe to the left or right on the app. This was changed in 2.0 to require tapping on the cover action icon instead, which might make sense on a tablet, but makes them virtually useless on a phone, as they are now very small buttons that are difficult to press. Is there any way to restore the old behavior?

There was a patch when this was introduced to get cover swipping back using up and down swipes. But it wasn't updated for a long time.

https://openrepos.net/content/nodeve...ulldown-covers

Yes, the "new Carousel Action" more or less perevents using sideways swipes for cover actions, since the swipe moves the whole canvas.

What I don't understand is why in the new scheme for sideways swipes both "swipe inside screen" and "edge swipe" perform the same action, namely rotate the carousel.

How I'd like to see it done;

• Swipe inside the screen acts on the cover that it is targeted.
  (or if no cover under finger, does nothing)
• Swipe from edge rotates the carousel

Or completely disable the carousel, like it's done in the "no home carousel" patch.

I completely agree. I always swipe from the edge anyway because that's how you move between an application and the home screen, it's how you open the application drawer, it's how you change ambiences or lock the screen and it's even how you can close applications. The lock screen is probably the only place where I swipe from the middle of the screen, and even there I mostly swipe from the side.

That said: if you have more applications/covers running than can fit on one screen, the home screen scrolls up and down, which could potentially be a problem with swipe actions on covers, because your finger almost never goes up or down in a straight line, so you could accidentally use a cover action instead of swiping up or down the overview of covers. This was never a problem on Sailfish 1.0, because there you could only interact with 9 covers, or however many could fit on the screen at one time, at most. Maybe Jolla researched this and found that the risk of accidentally triggering random cover actions outweighed the benefit of an easier way to use those cover actions. Given the Notes and Messages cover redesigns, though, I doubt much money has been spent on user experience research.

Huh, I didn't know you could run more than 9 apps now. In my experience (on the Jolla 1) whenever I get more then 6 or so open the OOM killer starts killing them all.

On my Nexus 4 with 2 gb RAM I try run about 50 apps (almost all apps which I have on my phone except Android apps) but phone goes slow because free RAM is about 50 mb .