Sailfish OS: Ex Nokia Employees Take on Android!

Sailfish UI

Marc Dillon still remembers the sick feeling that overcame him when Nokia announced it was scrapping a software project that he and hundreds of other developers had spent years creating. 

It was early 2011, and Nokia, the Finnish cellphone giant, was struggling to compete with the sudden rise of Apple and Samsung in the global smartphone market. In response, Nokia's chief executive, Stephen Elop, ended the company's plans for its own operating system and joined with Microsoft to focus on building Windows-based phones.

"I almost threw up when I heard the news," said Dillon, an American engineer living in Finland, who was laid off after the company's strategy shift. "Nokia did a lot of great things for a long time. We didn't want to see this part of the story end."

So Dillon and three other former Nokia executives took it upon themselves to prove their onetime bosses wrong.

Over the past three years, with the help of around $20 million in outside investment, they have built Jolla, a 100-employee company of mostly former Nokia engineers, to develop the operating system that Nokia discarded. Their goal is to compete with Android, Google's dominant mobile software. Late last year, they finished the first part of the effort, releasing a smartphone powered by its open-source software, Sailfish.


Sailfish is a Linux-based mobile operating system developed by Jolla in cooperation with the Mer project and supported by the Sailfish Alliance. It is to be used in upcoming smartphones by Jolla and other licencees[citation needed]. Although it is primarily targeted at mobile phones, it is also intended to support other categories of devices.

Mer and Mobile Relationship Chart

Lets have a look at what is underneath the hood.

Technology

Native:
For the best user experience and seamless native performance, applications built with Sailfish Silica Qt Quick components will be able to harness the full power of the devices running Sailfish OS.

Android runtime:
Sailfish OS includes the capability to run Android™ applications through a third party solution. It is based on open source Android libraries, ensuring performance comparable to the native environment.

With Sailfish using Qt5 and Wayland technology, existing hardware adaptations made for Android can be leveraged, significantly easing the hardware adaptation work required to support the Sailfish OS.

HTML5:
Web development tools like HTML, JavaScript and CSS can be used to utilize HTML5 on the Sailfish OS. We are investigating Cordova Qt and compatibility with Firefox OS APIs for this purpose.

Source: Sailfish