Floating The Jolla Dream

Navigate the choppy waters of Jolla’s titanic Sailfish OS voyage with the help of Sean Cameron.

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The holy grail for mobile manufacturers is a completely airtight top-down business model. In theory this is simple to achieve: create your own app store and operating system, get these onto a handful of top-notch devices and you’re laughing.

Actually pulling this off is exceptionally difficult, of course. At the beginning of the smartphone era it was a prize that any company could seemingly claim; since then most have failed, some have triumphed while others have barely survived, and Jolla – which translates from its native Finnish as ‘dinghy’ – falls into the latter camp.

Founded in the fallout following the protracted death of Nokia’s Services and Devices division, Jolla has clung to life through sheer bloody-mindedness. While other, bigger, richer firms have fallen, it seems the Jolla dinghy is almost impossible to sink.

It was in 2013 that Jolla first came to life, gathering the dying embers of MeeGo, Nokia’s last attempt at building an in-house operating system, and reviving them in a new platform dubbed Sailfish OS.

Sailfish OS

Sami Pienimakki, co-founder of the Finnish startup, still has a great deal of passion for MeeGo, along with many others at Jolla, with the team including a number of former engineers who worked on the ill-fated Nokia platform.

Sailfish is based on the underlying code behind MeeGo, with a new user interface that has been designed to make heavy use of gestures. However, while Jolla is proud of what it’s created in Sailfish OS, there’s a palpable sense that what exists is still a little half-baked.