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Officially supported Jolla devices have access to software called Alien Dalvik, which is software that allows Sailfish OS to run Android applications. This is convenient because while there are many wonderful things about Sailfish, it is still lacking in terms of many commercial applications. The default install of Alien Dalvik does not support the Official Google play store though and more importantly it does not support “Goole Play Services” which many applications use for various features such as Chromecast support.

Today I would like to walk through what you need to do to install the Google Play Store and Google Play Services under Alien Dalvik on your Sailfish X.

First things first, head over to this link and download gapps. Note that this is intentionally an older version of gapps. It will update itself automatically, but it installing newer version may or may not work to start.

Next we need to stop Alien Dalvik which is currently running on our Sailfish X device. To do this we open a terminal on the phone and run the commands:

devel-su

<enter password>

systemctl stop aliendalvik.service

systemctl mask aliendalvik.service

Next extract the gapps file you downloaded and in the directory system/priv-app/ you should find GmsCore.apk, GoogleLoginService.apk, GoogleServicesFramework.apk and Phonesky.apk

Copy these four files to the directory /opt/alien/system/priv-app/ on your Sailfish X device and change their permissions to 664 using the chmod command.

Next restart Alien Dalvik with the commands:

systemctl unmask aliendalvik.service

systemctl start aliendalvik.service

Finally run the command:

apkd-install Phonesky.apk

From your /opt/alien/system/priv-app directory and the installer for the Google Play Store will pop up on your Sailfish X device. If you have two factor authentication setup on your Google account you will need to enable an AppPassword for this version of the Play Store to log in for you.

On my Sailfish X the latest version of the Google Play Store (8.x as of today) does not seem to download applications properly so you will likely want to turn off automatic updates. The latest 6.x version of the Play Store which you can find in APK form from here seems to work as expected. If your Play Store updated automatically, you can simply remove it as you would with any application and then install the 6.x APK I linked earlier.