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Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

>And no Android inside please

To be fair, Nokia did release a nearly pure Linux (Meego) based communicator which nobody bought.

The ecosystems of Android and iOS means there is no room for competition that can be commercially successful. So if you're building a phone today it will be Android based if you actually want to sell it.

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Sailfish OS is still competing and Russia has made it its "official" mobile OS ... Many devices support it too - https://jolla-devices.com/sailfish_devices/ ...

The ties to Russia have been cut. By incindence before the war, but with the war they wouldn't have had any future anyway.

Of course lots of the software has open source licences so the Russian can even legally continue to use it. The UI components have a proprietary license. I don't know whether the Russians have the source, but I might guess they do. So they could continue to use it like they do with leased airplanes.

There weren't any "ties" with Russia to begin with. (Nor with China, even though Jolla also has some Chinese investors). What I remember is that Russia wanted an alternative to Android OS and ios. Samsung and Jolla pitched their Tizen OS and Sailfish OS respectively to the Russian government. Russia decided to go with Sailfish as Jolla was willing to license the whole source code and be more flexible with its term (partly out of desperation as it needed investment). Then some Russian company started the OMP ( https://tadviser.com/index.php/Company:Open_Mobile_Platform_... ) which licensed Sailfish OS to fork it and develop it as Aurora OS. OMP also committed to contribute code back to Sailfish OS, and aid its continuous development (75% of Sailfish OS is open source so they anyway would have to release the source). This company also invested in, and bought around 10% share of Sailfish holding (Hongkong) one of the investment vehicle created by Jolla. That Russian company then sold 75% of its share to Rostelecom, another Russian corporate (the Russian government owns 45% of the Rostelecom). Rostelecom also acquired 75% share of OMP, which it later increased to 99.9%.

So technically, Russia's official mobile OS is a clone of Sailfish OS it rebranded as Aurora OS that is owned by OMP, a Russian company, and not Jolla.

Also, after Russia invaded Ukraine, Jolla investors have been trying to cleverly use the anti-russian sentiments to its advantage by trying to convince european investors to buy the shares of Rostelecom. Source (in Finnish): https://www.linkedin.com/posts/samulisimojoki_putinin-hy%C3%... .

Thanks for the details, didn't remember it so well.

If your biggest owner is Rostelecom, talking of having no ties to Russia doesn't sound like a very correct characterization of the situation.

Yes, turnover from Russia was already zero last year.

But have they found a new owner? I haven't read anything (but I don't follow it very closely, so I might have just missed it)

That China and Russia don't want to depend on American operating systems is obvious.

But EU should not depend on an American duopoly either. Even if they are not our enemies their legal system when it comes to data protection and customer rights are not really compatible. And a duopoly is never healthy.

But Jolla has never managed to get any EU funding? Not that that would have never happened before, think Airbus. And I bet there are many smaller ones.

The Communicator-style device, the N900, was not based on Meego and was never sold in the United States. They sold just fine in the EMEA market which Nokia focused on. The Meego-based device, the N9, was released around the same time Stephen Elop torpedoed his own company, and nothing Nokia had for sale was attractive to anyone after that fiasco.

Hello, I'm nobody, and I bought the Nokia N9.

I still have n9, n900 and Jolla 1

I had unusual foresight at that time and explicitly bought the N9 because I was sure it was the last good phone from Nokia. And in the end I was pretty right.

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