Reconsidering SailfishOS as my daily driver
I'm having some second thoughts about keeping SailfishOS on my phone. There are two (and a half) main reasons: (1) I'm using alpha state software and sometimes that is noticeable, (2) I am dependant on a very vibe coded app which I don't know if I can trust, and (2.5) my battery lasts maybe half a day if I'm lucky. I'll start with the last one.
My Fairphone 4 is getting pretty old by now, and with it the battery has degraded like hell. Usually this is not a problem (just take off the back and put in a new one) but getting one is harder now that I live in Brazil and not in Norway. I do however have a friend who will be travelling from Norway to Brazil by the end of the month who might be able to bring a new one, hence why this is only half a point.
The two other ones are a little more severe and requires more work to actually get working.
I run an unofficial port for the FP4 tagged SailfishOScommunity(...)alpha, in other words with no official backers and not fully tested, stable port. At first I didn't think this would be a problem as I'm somewhat used to running applications that are still in a testing state - for most bugs I just get used to the workaround and if it breaks I usually have something to fall back on. In this case the fallback would be opening a wifi hotspot from my phone and instead using the android phone I carry with me. The problem here however is when something either fails without you noticing so you can't do a workaround or when the fallback itself dies.
The former I have barely experienced, mostly in notification daemons dying. This isn't that big of a problem as I don't exactly like receiving them in the first place, but it can be a little of a bitch when it's something more urgent like a call or a message about an upcoming workshop or other forms of gig-work. I've also had it become a close-to-daily occurence that I need to restart the homescreen and app service, or even reboot, to make apps launch again. I haven't had this issue that often with modems and other hardware, which is good, but it's still kind of a pain in the ass to not actually know with full certainty.
After my last blog post on switching, I got an email from someone who had similar experiences with running postmarketOS, where they could never be certain whether or not their cellular connection was actually working. To be sure they had to restart their phone once a day (or more) and even then it was sort of a Schrödingers modem-situation. "Does it work? I sure hope so!" . It's easy to imagine how this can become tiring. For me this feeling also applies for my two main messaging services, Signal and Whatsapp - which leads me to my final pain point: I don't trust the only native whatsapp-client for Sailfish, like, at all.
In my last post I mentioned how I cannot run Waydroid leading to me being fully dependant on native and web applications. Whatsapp sadly doesn't allow you to open it in web on the browser (which, tbf, I don't even know if ships a modern enough engine to be able to run the webpage) meaning that I either have to develop my own app or use the app from openrepos.net. This app works. It can send and receive messages and also lets you send and receive photos. That's sort of what I need, though I would also enjoy being able to call.
The problem is with it's reliability. This app too has a Schrödingers message-state, where I can see a message as sent from my phone only to have it not show up on any other devices. It has also at other times sent messages multiple times as duplicates, something that can apparently get you banned from whatsapp.
The app is also heavily vibe-coded and far from even a remotely defenseable way. First of all, every single commit is treated as a release meaning you're always on a git branch of the program. The developer can also push 7 commits and 17 "versions" on the same day. This application is in other words severely untested.
I recently came across a good microblog by Veronica Explains about how she avoids vibe-coded programs because you cannot be sure that the developer understands the codebase and will be able or even want to support it if/when something breaks. This is a good point, and was something that worried me when I first installed the program. It was slightly dulled down by the idea that the port technically only does the frontend whereas the backend is powered by whatsmeow, meaning that the developer must at least know something, right? Sadly, I have only come over things that to me confirm the opposite. Some selected comments from the forums include:
It's one thing to have a slopped application on your phone. It's another thing to be depandant on phone. It's again yet another thing to be dependant on having to trust one with a big part of your private messages.
Sure, there is an app existing right now and even thought it's super jank I guess it works. But even then, there's all of this shit to have to deal with, and also the date of which the app will "die", or at least the day that what seems to be the main dev (an LLM) will "leave" the project is only five days away. What happens if/when the app breaks then and the user it out of tokens? Or what if some regulation changes how the LLMS can work, what if the company gets fucked, the bubble pops, or if the LLM just implodes onto itself? It's way too hard for me to be able to actually trust this stuff, and writing about it makes me realize just how risky it actually feels to have this as one of my main dependencies for a working phone.
Going forward, I'm not really sure what I'm going to do. I'm generally speaking really impressed by how good SailfishOS is and could see myself getting a phone with official support of it in the future (given that I still want to have a smart phone that is). But with my current stack of an alpha-state unofficial build and a completely vital tool in this state, I honestly don't know what I'm going to do.