Glad to be of service

That depends on what you consider "success". It would certainly remain a niche product. Not that it is exactly mainstream now. It would limit the clientelle to those who are serious about an alternative, rather than just "bi-curious". Which I consider a good thing. The puzzled looks on absolutely everyone's face when I tried to sell them the idea of Sailfish with the main selling point that "don't worry, you can still run Android apps on it" was enough of an argument for me. Literally everyone just (righfully, IMO) asked, "why should I not just get an Android phone, then?".

There are also significant costs associated with Android support. Money spent on AD licencing could be saved or spent on something else. More importantly, the time and effort spent on supporting it could be used more productively on something else. For example, developing native apps (either in-house or by better supporting 3rd party devs) when there is no incentive now, because "Android is the answer to everything."

Lifeboat? Maybe. But lifeboats are not meant to be used! They are the last resort, not the first. If you design your ship in such a way that lifeboats are an integral part of its day-to-day operation right from the start, then you are doing something seriously wrong.

So, android support is bad because you're a bad salesman?

For sure if all you want to do is run android apps you're going to be way better off just owning an android phone.

But Jolla is still around and this Jala partnership could bare some nice fruit so it's interesting that you consider Sailfish to be dead.

Granted, I am not the greatest salesman on earth. That's why I am not one in my daytime job. But it's not just me, Jolla itself markets Android support as the main selling point. "Hey, we have this wonderful new independent OS for you and look, it can run applications written for another OS, completely negating the very idea of a separate OS. So you may as well ignore us and use the other OS! Isn't that fantastic?"

I'll get my coat. This discussion is pointless. The damage has been done, there is no point arguing what could have been.

pichlo makes a good point, it's the same as telling someone they should install a GNU/Linux distribution on their computer because they can still use all of their Windows software through Wine. It's a good stopgap for things where there is simply no alternative, but it shouldn't be a selling point. If Android had an interface designed for fingers and touch screens instead of a classic desktop point-and-click interface, there would be only two reasons left to convince people to use a Sailfish device: Sailfish gives you a terminal, and Sailfish is not owned by any of the American megacorporations. Just don't mention that the terminal also includes 10-year-old versions of everything because those are the last versions released with a GPLv2 license, and forget about any connections to other authoritarian regimes.

Agreed, it is pointless and off-topic.

I for one would love to have an updated alien dalvik so I can make use of the few apps that are not there in a native form.

Hopefully the future will give us more webapps that you can use on any platform.

@pichlo says it all, no need for me to come in and muddle things!

It does remind me a bit of OS/2; it had an excellent compatibility layer that let it run Windows applications (in some cases better than Windows itself). As a result, relatively few native OS/2 applications were written (because why write it twice if you can just write a windows application and have it run on both platforms?).

The one incentive I can think of for writing a native application would be the possibility that you could write an application that would work on Linux/Qt across the board. Unfortunately Jolla killed that possibility by keeping Sailfish Silica components closed, effectively making Sailfish a proprietary platform. I'm not sure which was more damaging, enabling Android apps or closing Sailfish Silica, but I doubt that either had a positive effect.

but we don't need that. We don't need mobile apps that can work/be ported to desktop. I wish there is just 10% of desktop choice for sailfis. And closed silica is not the reason why there isn't. And it didn't stop Meteora softworks to make the best music player for sailfish. That I had to buy outside of official store.
Just because something is OSS doesn't mean much. Look at Signal and what happened when guys wanted to create a sailfish version. Or Telegram. Or.....
And we do have all that on desktop. Even if it is crappy Electron, but it's there.

The Signal developers have since adopted a less aggressive approach. Either way there was no way they could ever have blocked access to third party clients, because the third party clients could just pretend to be the official one.