Sailfish OS is a Linux-based smartphone operating system that has its roots in the discontinued Maemo, MeeGo, and Moblin projects.
This week the developers released Sailfish OS 3.4 featuring an updated browser engine with bug fixes, better reliability, and support for copying and pasting HTML text in the email client, among other things.
Other changes in Sailfish OS 3.4 include support for:
- Multiple user accounts on a single device,
- Automatic scheduled cloud backups for your data including bookmarks, contacts, and calender events (previously you had to manually initiate a backup),
- Hourly weather forecast events
- Improved gesture navigation for answering or declining incoming phone calls
- New 10-second skip and rewind buttons in the video player
- Encryption enabled by default on new devices
You can find more bug fixes, improvements, and feature changes in the release notes for Sailfish OS 3.4.
While Sailfish OS is based on open source software, the user interface is proprietary code. But there’s an SDK that allows developers to create compatible applications. There’s also support for running some Android apps on at least some devices thanks to the inclusion of Alien Dalvik.
The operating system is developed by Finnish company Jolla, which shipped the first phone running Sailfish OS in 2013, failed to successfully deliver a Jolla tablet in 2015, and eventually got out of the hardware business entirely after releasing one more limited edition phone the following year.
These days Jolla is focused on continued development of Sailfish, which can be installed on a handful of smartphones including the discontinued Jolla phones and several Sony Xperia smartphones as well as the Planet Computers Gemini PDA. There are unofficial/community builds for other devices including the PinePhone and F(x)tec Pro1.