Open letter to Jolla community: through the tough times

They brought this upon themselves. Their progress updates on the tablet project have been consistently late, vague, and they withheld information from the backers for as long as possible. They didn't even change the pre-order page when it was clear they missed the promised shipment date.

Example: their press release about debt restructuring was released on Friday (20 November), but there was no explanation to IGG backers until this post on 24 November.

So, yes, they are in financial difficulties. But in the process of developing the tablet, they completely lost all credibility to the community (at least those of us who aren't Jolla apologists) when they didn't communicate openly to backers, and consistently missed deadlines they themselves set (e.g. shipping, communicating delays, requests for details).

Guys, a tip: "open" means that you have a dialogue with your backers. Thus far, "open" to you means that you communicate late, vaguely, and with absolutely no community interaction. This includes barely answering community questions in your blog posts (see: https://blog.jolla.com/tablet_schedule_aptoide_store/ ) where you spend most of the blog post spewing marketing shit and not answering the fundamental question people had been asking, which was: hey, where the hell is my tablet and why aren't you giving us straight answers to questions?

In my view, it is irresponsible bordering on criminal to continue accepting pre-orders from people when the schedule is wrong, and you don't provide any details on the schedule when asked.

Dang... This is the most expensive IGG I've ever backed and they've just kept pushing back, and it sounds like we won't even get the tablet. That's really disappointing. I was actually pretty excited to try out the OS.

I feel a little cheated too, when I backed them I was under the impression that they were a lot more open. Not just in terms of communication, but I also thought their OS was open source. I only found out a few months back that it wasn't the case. This is probably my own fault, though. I really should've looked more closely into it before signing up.

Not surprising at all given that they haven't yet figured out what their product is.

(Note: if your product is an OS, then your customers are OEM's, not regular people. Haven't heard of _any_ efforts by Jolla to court OEM's.)

I ordered a phone from them last week. The shop said it's 2 to 5 days delivery, the confirmation said allow for 5 to 10 days, now this post tells me it will be 10 to ∞ days.

I don't think debt restructuring is a fun process, so I wish them well.

They completely brought it upon themselves. You can't just release a phone and then essentially abandon your users - the phone is buggy, email client and browser are borderline unusable and they break features in between releases. It also crashes randomly. Recent update completely broke push-USSD feature which my bank uses, there are open bugs, no response.

If you want to enter the phone market now, even if it's possible at all, you need to deliver ROCK SOLID experience, not something that resembles symbian.

Can't say i'm surprised. Their support and communication has been consistently horrible. Their focus on the OS entirely misplaced -- no, more eye candy is not the first thing we need. The platform had a lot of potential, but they've squandered it time and time again.

Sorry to hear this. I signed up for one as I thought it would be fun to be involved, in a small way. But the delay will kill the product and the company. The market moves too fast.

I put in an order for a Jolla tablet. With the layoffs it doesn't seem as if the order will be fulfilled.

Typo in the title "tough"