Jolla
Jolla is a Finnish mobile software company, founded in 2011 by engineers who left Nokia after it abandoned its own Linux platform, that develops Sailfish OS and sells it both as a licensed operating system for other companies and preinstalled on phones of its own.
Jolla Oy is registered in Finland and works out of Helsinki and Tampere. The name is the Finnish word for a small boat, which was a fair description of the company against the size of what it left behind. Everything Jolla ships is downstream of Nokia’s Maemo work: the kernel and userland lineage runs from Maemo through MeeGo to the Mer core project, and from Mer into Sailfish OS.
Who founded Jolla, and why they left Nokia
Jolla was founded by former Nokia staff from the MeeGo programme, and the reason they left is a matter of public record: on 11 February 2011 Nokia announced that Windows Phone would become its primary smartphone platform, which left the Linux team building a product with no future inside the company. The group that formed Jolla included Marc Dillon, Sami Pienimaki, Stefano Mosconi and Jussi Hurmola, who was the first chief executive; Sami Pienimaki has served as chief executive in the years since. The company was registered in 2011 and made itself public in July 2012, by which point Nokia had already shipped the N9, the one and only MeeGo handset, in September 2011.
The founders did not take Nokia’s code with them in any informal sense. Sailfish OS is built on Mer, the community fork of the MeeGo core that was restarted in 2011 under an open licence after Intel and the Linux Foundation moved their effort to Tizen in September 2011. What Jolla carried across was the design thinking, the Qt expertise and the people.
What Jolla builds
Jolla builds two things: Sailfish OS itself, and, at intervals, hardware to run it. The operating system is a Linux distribution with an RPM package format, a Qt and QML application stack, and a gesture-driven interface called Silica that has no hardware or on-screen back button, because the swipe from the screen edge does that job. The kernel and most of the middleware are open source; the interface layer and the Android application compatibility layer are proprietary Jolla components, which is the single most contested fact about the platform and the reason community builds of Sailfish look and behave differently from the shipped product.
The hardware side has been intermittent. The first Jolla Phone was announced in May 2013 and delivered from November 2013. The Jolla Tablet followed as an Indiegogo campaign in November 2014, was funded, and then largely failed to ship, with only a fraction of backers receiving a unit and the rest offered refunds that the company struggled to pay. The Jolla C2 Community Phone, announced in Helsinki in May 2024, is the current device. Alongside it Jolla announced the Mind2, a small local AI appliance, which is the first product the company has shipped that is not a phone.
How Jolla licenses Sailfish OS
Jolla licenses Sailfish OS to governments, operators and device makers who want a mobile platform that is not controlled by Google or Apple, and this, rather than handset sales, has been the company’s main commercial argument since about 2015. Three licensing routes have existed in practice:
| Route | Who it is for | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Sovereign or corporate licensing | States and large organisations | A branded, independently maintained fork with source access, security hardening and local support |
| Sailfish X | Individual owners of supported hardware | A paid image for selected Sony Xperia models, with the proprietary components and Android application support included |
| Preinstalled on Jolla hardware | Buyers of the Jolla C2 | The full platform, licensed and configured, working from first boot |
The licensing business has been geopolitical from the start. A Russian licensee shipped a Sailfish derivative under the name Aurora OS, and Jolla announced in 2022, after the invasion of Ukraine, that it was separating itself from that business entirely. Sailfish X, launched in October 2017 for the Sony Xperia X, remains the way an individual can put the platform on hardware Jolla does not sell, and it depends on Sony’s own Open Devices programme for the low level device support.
Is Jolla still trading
Yes, Jolla is still trading, and it has survived two financial near-deaths to do so. In late 2015 the company entered court-supervised corporate restructuring in Finland after a funding round collapsed, cut staff, and came out the other side with the tablet unfinished. The second reorganisation came in the early 2020s, tangled up with the separation from the Russian licensing business; in 2024 the operating business was bought back by a group led by the founders, and the C2 announcement in May of that year was the first visible product of that. A company that has been written off twice in fifteen years and is still shipping releases is an unusual thing in mobile software, and it is worth stating plainly rather than romantically.
This page is part of an independent reference. It is not written by Jolla, has no relationship with the company, and carries no firmware or installation images. For what Jolla currently sells and what a licence includes, the company’s own site is the only authoritative source.
Where Jolla sits in the Maemo lineage
Jolla sits at the end of a lineage that starts in 2005, and the chain is unbroken in code even where it was broken in corporate terms. Nokia announced the 770 Internet Tablet in May 2005 running Maemo, a Debian-derived Linux with a Hildon interface. Five devices later that line reached The Nokia N900 in November 2009, running Maemo 5, the first and last Maemo device with a cellular radio. Maemo was merged with Intel’s Moblin to form MeeGo at Mobile World Congress in February 2010, MeeGo was abandoned by both sponsors within eighteen months, the community forked its core as Mer, and Jolla built Sailfish OS on top of Mer.
What this means for a reader holding an old N900 is concrete rather than sentimental: the package manager, the Qt heritage, the assumption that a phone is a general purpose computer with a root shell, and a good number of the actual names in the changelogs are the same across twenty years. The five stages, Maemo, MeeGo, Mer, Nemo Mobile and Sailfish OS, are separate projects with separate licences and separate governance, and treating them as one continuous product would be wrong. Treating them as unrelated would be wronger.