Jolla Blog

tl;dr - Jolla tried to make a tablet based on an existing Chinese tablet design (Aigo X86). [0] They screwed up the project management to legendary levels, lied to backers, and kept the money. Backers have received NOTHING from Jolla and still don't have a refund. What Jolla did to Jolla Tablet backers borders on fraud. Jolla had the chance for a popular product with people who wanted an Apple/Google alternative, but destroyed their relationship with the community through their repeated delays and lying.

===

I would celebrate, but I have first hand experience with the incompetent management at Jolla. So, I don't expect this to really make an impact at all.

Jolla ran an IndieGoGo campaign to manufacture a Jolla tablet. [1] They raised over $2 million dollars, then spent the next 18 months mismanaging the project into the ground.

By early-2016, their ODM in China had manufactured all the tablets for the backers, something like 10,000 tablets were made. But Jolla ran out of money to pay the factory for the units (and in the mean time, mislead all the backers and said there were no tablets at all).

Now, I know people are going to say "it's crowdfunding, they're not required to give you anything" and that's true.

But what Jolla did next was really, really angering. They only delivered a hand full of the tablets manufactured [2]. The factory actually started selling the finished tablets directly on Taobao, so people who weren't even part of the IndieGoGo campaign could buy…

I'm not familiar with the background here.

There was a blog post committing to refunds given sufficient cashflow, posted in 2017:

<https://blog.jolla.com/summer-2017-ceo-update/>

HN discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14637748>

It does appear that Jolla has shipped other products (SailfishOS, the Jolla Phone in 2013, some tablets, and others, see Wikipedia: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolla#Sailfish_OS_products>).

Since 2017 the company has gone through bankruptcy and re-launched.

It should be remembered that kickstarter / crowdfunded ventures, as with any other, are speculative and risky. A good-faith effort to deliver on spec is itself credible, and the landscape is littered with the husks of far more failures, especially in the mobile space, including from former (and current) giants: RIM, Palm, Microsoft, Mozilla, Canonical, off the top of my head). Google and Apple are the only present significant OS options standing, Apple (again) and Samsung dominate hardware, though there's increasing competition largely from China.

I'm using Sailfish OS on an Xperia X since when it became available. My main reason to migrate from Android was "battery life" which was confirmed (battery now lasts ~5 days instead of the usual 2-3), but the OS has a lot of small and bigger bugs (e.g. carrier selection, 2G/3G/4G priority, stuck data comm for Android apps) and missing features (notoriously: tethering/wlan access point, bluetooth) that do not currently make it a valid alternative for a normal user if compared to the other operating systems. Version 2.1.4 beta is available (https://blog.jolla.com/sailfish-os-2-1-4-now-available-early-access/) which might fix many bugs and deliver some key features, but the date for the final release has not been published (and I'm too scared to brick my phone by installing the beta).

how exactly is an unlocked bootloader after 4 years of use going to help to reduce e-waste?

It allows you install a different operating systems. When newer versions of Windows ran slower on old systems, many people switched to Linux to use the same hardware for some more years. And we do have different mobile OS too today. The free LineageOS also has breathed new life to many an old device. Jolla, a Finnish company, even sells licenses for their Sailfish OS ( and https://jolla.com/sailfishx/ ) for Sony Open Devices ( https://developer.sony.com/develop/open-devices/ ). They supported their first phone with 7 years of free OS updates. ( https://blog.jolla.com/jolla7/ ).

I think they do, just an old one as ESR AFAIK does not guarantee you stability of the internal APIS needed for embedding between ESR versions.

I think it's at least 45 ESR, as mentioned in release notes ~year ago: https://blog.jolla.com/hossa/

There is an issue tracking the Gecko update on the community discussion/bug reporting tool used for Sailfish OS: https://together.jolla.com/question/133621/update-gecko-in-the-browser/

The source of the Sailfish OS browser lives here: https://github.com/sailfishos/sailfish-browser

(Even though Sailfish OS is sadly not fully open source, the browser is as are other core applications and frameworks.)

Rostelecom (Russia public telecom) basically has majority stake in Sailfish. This stuff is not hard to search online, you know.

https://together.jolla.com/question/178875/rostelecom-acquiring-votron-the-majority-owner-in-jolla/
https://www.mobileworldlive.com/devices/news-devices/russian-operator-linked-with-sailfish-buy
https://blog.jolla.com/new-strategic-investor-joins-sailfish-family/ et al.

But this is not the problem. I would not have any problem with a 100% russian OS, as long as it was OSS. But Sailfish is also not OSS. That is the problem.