I think they did support Android apps at that time, but only on the official devices (which is the same situation as now).

I flashed 2.x back then, too, back in the glory days of flashing ubuntu touch and firefox os, etc. I loved the UI of Sailfish. Fatal flaw for me was the inability to group text. As far as I know there is still no group texting. The European users/devs claim this isn’t an issue, because they all use third party messaging apps.

I’m glad they’re still developing Sailfish!