[SailfishDevel] SFOS 3 public roadmap

[dep]

said Alexander Ivash:

| I know this was asked a lot of times but was never in fact answered (or
| I can't find the answer)... Anyway, when can I expect public roadmap to
| be published? Asking because now I have hard choice: live with
| incomplete SFOS 3 on XA2 Plus or flash android back to it.

Based on what's publicly available, there seems to be little likelihood of 
a "public roadmap" from Jolla. Not to criticize Jolla, but its objectives 
are not presently the needs and desires of the community. Watch the 
rollout of SFOS 3:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65Ob80PRT3c

>From that it seems clear that the effort is going to those who have made 
investments in the company. Again, this is not a criticism -- they have 
this desire to live indoors and eat regularly. But it is to note that 
answering to individual users is not an apparent priority.

| In particular I'm very interested in better browser (recent enough to at
| least handle Zippie) and NFC reader (less important). Currently there is
| no android support available so I can't install even android browser
| (although would love to get modern native browser one day and forget
| about android compatibility forever).

As was pointed out, the meeting-before-last did not give as much good news 
as many of us had hoped it would. In particular, as I read the transcript, 
there's no evidence that coming up with a better browser is as important 
to Jolla as it is to us. And unless I'm very much mistaken, the "new" 
webkit when it arrives will already be considerably outdated.

(I'm campaigning against my own interests here, I think: the one site that 
is essential to me, ProtonMail, works properly in the Sailfish Browser, 
but it does not in either WebCat or WebPirate -- it loads, but login 
returns an "incorrect login information" error on all but the SFOS 
Browser. I'm a little fearful that a new browser will break what already 
works. It would be lovely if, as suggested in the first answer here 
https://together.jolla.com/question/193884/browser-shortcut-not-working-consistently-in-app-grid/
there were a proper webapp framework/app, but it seems there's little 
development in that area until there's a sense of what to develop *for*.)

I'll digress a little here. As a survivor of the OS/2 wars of the 1990s, I 
was witness to what happens to a superior operating system when it is able 
to run applications for an inferior operating system. OS/2 was able to run 
both DOS and Windows applications -- the sales slogan was "A better DOS 
than DOS and a better Windows than Windows" -- though apps for those 
operating systems did not make full use of the advanced features of OS/2 
the way native applications could and did. But developers (though this was 
an era when most development was done by companies; FOSS was not yet the 
big thing it is today) saw no reason to develop for OS/2, when they could 
write for Windows and have their application run on both.

>From this experience it's easy to observe that while Android support is an 
aid to users, it is also a long-term threat to SFOS development. At a 
minimum, it means that if we want anything native, we'll have to write it 
ourselves.

It would be nice, I agree, if Jolla were to give us a sense of the 
direction it is heading, as specifically as possible, but there's no sense 
that this is happening, is going to happen soon, or, truth be known, it 
will ever happen. I can't help but get the sense, from the rollout video 
above and from what has transpired since, that individual users just 
aren't all that important to Jolla.

I look forward to being proved wrong!
-- 
dep

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