I had a Jolla smart phone, it was pretty great but it also quickly became apparent that the company had no real intention to make Sailfish the Android-compatible, open and privacy-friendly OS I was hoping it’d be. Selling licenses to customers to put the OS on third party hardware really killed it for me.
Kinda surprised they are still around, but I guess knowing the right magical words to whisper to investors is a good enough business strategy. They’ve done it with blockchain, now it’s AI.
Jolla says the phone will sell for €299 (including a 1-year subscription license for Sailfish OS)
Emphasis mine. Mate, just what are you doing? A subscription license of a mobile OS? Wat? They could be working together with Purism, Pine64, PostMarketOS and other software+hardware groups trying to make linux phones popular, but instead they are making some proprietary stuff in their corner. Is it really that difficult to work with other people or what’s going on?
They are trying to make money to stay afloat. Postmarketos is a community project so it’s not comparable. And neither Purism nor Pine64 seem to be huge commercial successes just like Jolla, though they seem to be doing a bit better.
If they need a subscription model for the OS, then maybe it shouldn’t stay afloat. Clearly there’s no money in this.
