Article in Aamulehti about Jolla (finnish only)

General
#1

Paywalled,
10 chars.

4 Likes
Best performance device for sailfish os
#2

Thought about subscribing and cancel during the first month, but as it is in finnish I don’t dare, not sure if I even with a translator I would succeed to get that done…

Is there someone who could summarise the main content, e.g. in bulletpoints?

3 Likes
#3

I will do my best,

Let’s start with history:

  • Nokia had spent billions in the development of Meego, but when Elop was elected, the next phone was decided to be built on Windows Phone 7.
  • Sami Pienimäki (Jolla’s current CEO) decided to build a team to continue the work to develop Meego.
  • The first workers were hired in 2012.
  • The first Jolla phone was supposed to be made in collaboration with ST-Ericsson, but that company quit all activity during that time.
  • Jolla decided to take a risk and manufacture their own phone by themselves.
  • That phone was sold only 100,000 pieces. Profit-wise, it should have sold around 1 million pieces.
  • Jolla tablet suffered from a serious misfortune, when one of the components couldn’t be delivered.
  • At its height, Jolla had 128 staff members. In three months, that number was cut down to 25.
  • Jolla was forced to concentrate solely on the development of the mobile OS.
  • In 2016, Jolla started to search capital from Russia.
  • The year 2020 was the first profitable year for Jolla with revenue of 500,000 euros.
  • Jolla started to cut ties to Russia in 2021, before Russia launched the full-scale attack to Ukraine. Also, Rostelecom was seeking independence from western companies.
  • In the year 2021, the outcome was negative of 1,1 million euros.
  • The accounting of the year 2022 is not fully complete, but Pienimäki expects it to be on the plus side.

What’s going on today

  • Currently, one of the minor shareholders is Russian. Jolla is negotiating with them to buy them out and properly cut ties to Russia.
  • Jolla is concentrating on the development of AppSupport for the automotive industry.
  • Jolla wants to be able to offer an alternative for the Android ecosystem in various industries. (This seemed more like a reporter’s remark, but I’m not sure)

EDIT: typos, I was busy when writing this :grin:

36 Likes
#4

Thank you for all these details! Although following Jolla since the beginning, there are some interesting new details. And I am especially happy that it doesn’t contain any too bad news regarding the future :slight_smile:

2 Likes
#5

At least we now know more about the next officially supported device - it will be a car SCNR:)

6 Likes
#6

Good one! :laughing: (20 chars)

1 Like
#7

I’m happy that they’re getting a grip with app support, car manufacturers and other industries. They need to secure the company’s future!
That aside, I also worry a bit for the future of sfosX.
Anyway, good news and positive thinking!

2 Likes
#8

As long as sfos is piggy-backed on android, it will always be challenging to compete. Stockholm syndrome et al. And yes, unfortunately its the only way, for now.

2 Likes
#9

I’ve got this wonderful Saab… :upside_down_face:

3 Likes
#10

I’d guess that the best option to overcome this restriction would be to use postmarketOS as common base for upcoming releases. Of course pmOS hardware support is far from completed for most devices, however, porting to a new/other device would only require changes in the (seperate) postmarketos base but not the entire sailfishos distribution, I’d guess.

#11

What benefit jolla and consumers would have if something like this happened?

#12

PostmarketOS Homepage makes the impression to me that PMOS also runs on top of Sony binaries. So what’s the benefit, what’s the difference?
IMHO the goal should be to get rid of all Android base stuff and make a real and open source Linux phone, the SFOS GUI is imho the best i know. Maybe it’s possible to get familiar with another one, but I wouldn’t be happy if I would have to try.

2 Likes
#13

Yes please. With fully open stack from hw to app. Risc-v! How do we fund another qualcomm?

1 Like
#14

Full control on the stack? Where control means transparency.

#15

Do you think think that this should be a priority?
What I see is that first we need proper ringer tones/no echo in VoLTE, Wi-Fi calling, no dropped calls, (reliably) working alarms, app support that doesn’t run in 15 FPS, triple camera support, proper post processing in photos and quite a few others.

I’m not trying to devalue your desire, but from my perspective there are so many basic things that MUST be fixed/added first before stack.

6 Likes
#16

The point here was about android vs sfos.

Yes of course the OS as a product needs improvement. However, without developers (customers?)
there is no traction. Without traction, one has to prioritize. Would having it’s own platform create more traction? That is the question here.

#17

I understand what you mean but didn’t jolla start like this basically and almost went bankrupt 2 years later?
How much can you do if you don’t write software for your own hardware in this case?

1 Like
#18

Technically speaking (and afaik) the original platform provider (Ericsson / STMicroelectronics) withdrew from the market while Jolla was building their product on the platform, forcing them to fall back to android - which is something that had to be done in 6 months (or so I heard).
So basically they did NOT go bankrupt because of their “own” platform; but rather because their product, which was meant for Platform A, was not mature for Platform B. Needless to say, the day I was standing in line in Narikkatori, when the “Beta” text appeared next to the SailfishOS logo, it was apparent - it was not ready for end-users (as it still seems to sometimes not be).

The common part here (as you correctly pointed out) is the “readiness” of the system; the problem has not changed, Jolla is busy surviving. And finding someone that is interested to push SFOS as a product seems challenging especially now that customers like Russia are, well, not so interesting anymore (if you take my words).

But, this is only my recap of the story - take it with a grain of salt :slight_smile:

Again, the main question remains - if Jolla would have been able to release on the original platform; would the result have been different? How more efficient would it be to write software for Jolla, compared to reverse-engineer and piggy-back on binary driver blobs?

4 Likes
#19

And why not going into some partnership like for example Volla.

#20

Fairphone once stated that althought they would love to partner with jolla, they need to survive too, and android is the key to survive. Maybe is the same for Volla?