The Finns who refuse to give up on Sailfish OS

The Finns who refuse to give up on Sailfish OS

Jolla is the last company with an 'alternative' mobile operating system.

Wander the halls of Mobile World Congress and you'll notice a theme on almost every phone manufacturer's stall: Android. Google's operating system has slowly suffocated every "alternative" adversary including Firefox OS, Ubuntu Touch and Windows Phone. But in the middle of hall five you'll find an unlikely holdout -- Sailfish, a quirky mobile platform by Tampere-based developer Jolla. Walk by the company's stall and you'll find a small group of Finnish employees eagerly showing off the few phones that run their swipe-based software. They're grinning like children, which is no surprise given the hell they've been through to get here. Most people know Jolla for its quirky 'other half' phone. It was the first hardware to run Sailfish OS -- a continuation of the MeeGo platform that Nokia abandoned for Windows Phone -- and boasted swappable backs that could add new hardware features and themed software. Jolla hoped brands would build backs for their most devout fans — a Real Madrid cover, for instance, might come with custom wallpaper, ringtones and an app for watching matches -- but few embraced the idea. Still, the hardware was intriguing because of the operating system it shipped with. In a sea of Android conformity, Jolla stood out.



The combination of custom hardware and software is reminiscent of Apple. But in truth, Jolla was seeking a platform play similar to Google and Android. It wanted to license its operating system but couldn't get anyone to take its pitch seriously. The industry was, unsurprisingly, skeptical of a startup with a completely unproven platform. To win them over, Jolla needed to make a smartphone of its own first. "We realised that we had to develop our own phone in order to bring life to the Sailfish operating system," Sami Pienimäki, CEO and cofounder of Jolla said. Many of Jolla's employees were former Nokia staff, so the company had some experience shipping phones. The first Sailfish device, however, was a completely different challenge. The phone needed a suite of stock applications and a custom app store with robust submission and moderation processes. The team also required distribution partners -- or at minimum, a reliable online storefront -- and a customer service team that could deal with basic troubleshooting, device repairs and over-the-air software updates. "All of that kind of stuff, we just had to build it," Pienimäki explains, "like a real go-to-market project does." In February 2013, Jolla attended MWC with a prototype version of the phone. Three weeks after the show, ST-Ericsson, the team's chipset provider, called Pienimäki to announce it was exiting the mobile business. Jolla had just promised its investors that the phone would ship by the end of the year. "We had a really, really, really, shitty situation," Pienimäki recalls. The team reworked the system architecture so it could support Qualcomm, MediaTek and other third-party processors. While stressful, it meant the company could support more hardware and coax a wider range of device manufacturers. The Jolla phone came out in November 2013. It shipped with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor, 1GB of RAM and a 16GB of internal storage. The company was praised for trying something different with its software, which centered on swipes from the edges of the display. But many, including Engadget, found the interface to be needlessly complicated and confusing. Although the phone never sold in large, meaningful quantities, Jolla had its fans, and the launch showed that the company was serious about its dream of an alternative operating system.