Sony co-branding option with Jolla?

General
#1

I’m just generally musing about this, but I think it’s a very good strategy to not rely on just one OS vendor for a company’s mobile device strategy. Huawei comes to mind, post-sanction-wise. Although Sony isn’t in any particular danger of suffering a similar fate, I think it’s prudent to pursue an official co-branding effort with another OS vendor just to have on standby. Jolla fits the bill perfectly, due to their presence on the open devices program.

My concern though would be this. Does Google mandate that only their OS can be installed on supported devices, per some contractual requirements? I’m harking back to the time when Microsoft managed to squeeze Be out from any formal OEM arrangements to distribute BeOS on their PCs.

Ideally, if Sony could offer just a bit more support for an alternative (with proper support for bootloader locking, official DRM keys for the camera, etc) with an official flash option and support infrastructure, this could help Jolla spread their wings further and allow Sony to make SailfishOS a first class citizen on all of their devices. Thoughts?

5 Likes
#2

There’s no need for Sony to do that.
Every company that tried using different OSes finally realized that it doesn’t worth pursuing anything else other than android. Even Huawei just created their own android fork and went with that.
Sony has a very small target group on the mobile division, so just a few thousand people more doesn’t worth any R&D or resources.
Support-wise Sony can’t even keep up with other android vendors supporting their devices 5 years for example, so why spread yourself thin even more?

I used to believe that very small companies might have better luck with sailfish, but even them don’t want to jump on official sfos support (eg Pine, Fxtec etc).

Don’t get me wrong, I would love to see any company supporting sfos. I just don’t see it happening from a business perspective.

3 Likes
#3

I think it’s a good idea - if it’s possible wrt Android contracts.

The way I see it neither Jolla nor Sony have anything to lose. No need for Sony to “support” SFOS other than take a few very small (and minimum effort - just add a key to their bootloader) steps towards SFOS in exchange for a bilateral promise.

I don’t think @matt.nawrocki is talking about selling Sony devices wth SFOS preinstalled.

In fact, this is a very realistic idea - unlike many high-flying dreams & demands I’m constantly hearing here and in the F(L)OSS world.

3 Likes
#4

This is exactly where my mind was going. I realize Sony is strapped for resources and I didn’t think they should have preinstalled devices. It’s the first class citizen access in general that I think is most important. They don’t have to expend any crazy resources or capital to do this for sure.

1 Like