Jolla
Jolla is a Finnish company that designs and sells smartphones running Sailfish OS, a Linux mobile platform whose development began inside the open-source MeeGo community and was carried out of Nokia by a group of ex-employees in 2011. The name comes from Finnish, where "jolla" means "in the water" or "in the midst of," a phrase that the founding team chose to signal a small group swimming against the current of the mobile industry after Nokia's mobile division was sold. It is not a restaurant, a beach town, or a brand of bread; it is a phone company, and everything on this page refers to that company and its devices. This site is an independent reference and is not affiliated with Nokia, Jolla, maemo.org, or the original Maemo Freak blog; it hosts no firmware, no ROMs, and no repackaged applications.
The company behind the name
Jolla Oy is a Helsinki-based phone company that formed in 2011, the same year Nokia's mobile operations were sold to Microsoft and the MeeGo platform lost its corporate sponsor. The founding team drew its members from two sources: the MeeGo development community, which had spent years building a Linux desktop-and-phone stack, and the open-source community that had long sustained the Maemo project on The Nokia N900 and earlier Nokia internet tablets. When the sale went through in 2013, the people who had kept MeeGo alive had no employer left, and Jolla was their answer to that question. The company's stated goal from the start was to ship a commercially supported Linux phone, and its first product, The first Jolla Phone, arrived in 2013 as a direct continuation of the hardware and software lineage that Maemo had begun in 2005 on the Nokia N800. The name itself is Finnish, not Spanish: "jolla" is a locative form of "vesi" (water), and the company has used it in that sense ever since, which is why a search for "jolla in english" or "jolla en ingles" lands on the same word in every language.
What the company has shipped
The first Jolla Phone shipped in 2013 with a 3.6-inch display, a 1.0 gigahertz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor, 2 gigabytes of RAM, and 16 gigabytes of internal storage, running a Sailfish OS build that the company had begun developing under the working name MeeGo Harmattan Reloaded. The hardware was a 133-gram unibody with a 14-megapixel rear camera and a 1,140 milliamperere hour battery, dimensions that placed it squarely in the compact-phone category that larger screens have since made rare. Three further devices followed: the Celia reference platform in 2014, which gave developers a 5-inch display and a 64-bit processor; the Jolla Tablet in 2015, a 10.1-inch device running the same Sailfish OS kernel; and the Jolla 2 in 2018, which carried a 5.5-inch 2K display, a 3.2 gigahertz octa-core chip, and 6 gigabytes of RAM. Each device shipped with the same core operating system, and each one extended the feature set that the original 2013 phone had introduced. The table below summarizes the 4 main hardware releases.
| Device | Year | Display | Processor | RAM | Storage |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jolla (1st gen) | 2013 | 3.6 in, 720 x 1280 | Snapdragon S4, 1.0 GHz dual-core | 2 GB | 16 GB |
| Celia (developer) | 2014 | 5 in, 720 x 1280 | Snapdragon 400, 1.2 GHz quad-core | 2 GB | 16 GB |
| Jolla Tablet | 2015 | 10.1 in, 1920 x 1200 | Snapdragon 400, 1.2 GHz quad-core | 2 GB | 32 GB |
| Jolla 2 | 2018 | 5.5 in, 2560 x 1440 | Snapdragon 660, 2.2 GHz octa-core | 6 GB | 64 GB |
Sailfish OS, the software that ties it together
Sailfish OS is the operating system that runs on every Jolla device, and it is the direct descendant of MeeGo, the Linux platform that Nokia and Intel co-developed and that the MeeGo community carried forward after the 2011 collapse of the MeeGo Foundation. Where MeeGo had provided a shared kernel and a Qt-based desktop environment, Sailfish OS rebuilt the user experience from the ground up around a single swipe-gesture model, a cover lock screen that doubles as a notification hub, and a home application launcher that users can replace with third-party launchers from the Jolla Store. The system ships with a built-in app platform written in C++ and QML, and a separate Android compatibility layer that lets users run a limited set of Android apps through an appsupport subsystem. The Jolla Store, the company's own app marketplace, carries fewer than 200 native titles, a small number by any modern standard, but the community forums and the developer documentation that Jolla publishes openly keep the platform usable for the owners who remain. The relationship between Jolla and the wider Linux ecosystem is straightforward: Sailfish OS uses the Linux kernel, it inherits the Debian packaging discipline that Maemo established, and it shares the same open-source licensing model that the MeeGo project had used before its corporate sponsors withdrew.
How Jolla compares to the phones people actually buy
Jolla sits in a different market segment from the two devices that searchers most often place beside it, and the comparison table below makes the 3 axes that matter for most buyers explicit. The first axis is operating system lineage: Sailfish OS is a Linux derivative with a 15-year history in the MeeGo and Maemo communities, while both Android and iOS are closed or semi-closed commercial platforms. The second axis is repairability and ownership: Jolla phones ship with open bootloaders and published kernel sources, a practice that the Fairphone series has adopted independently for hardware-level repairability. The third axis is market size, where Jolla is the smallest of the three by an order of magnitude.
| Axis | Jolla (Sailfish OS) | Fairphone (Android) | iPhone (iOS) |
|---|---|---|---|
| OS lineage | Linux, MeeGo/Maemo community, 2011 origin | Android, Google, 2008 origin | iOS, Apple, 2007 origin |
| Hardware repair | Open bootloader, community guides | Modular design, published repair manual, 95 percent recyclable target | Welded components, limited self-repair program since 2022 |
| App ecosystem | Under 200 native titles, Android compat layer | Full Google Play access, 3.5 million apps | App Store, 1.8 million apps |
| Typical price (launch) | 399 euros (Jolla 2, 2018) | 599 euros (Fairphone 4, 2021) | 699 to 999 USD (iPhone 14 series, 2022) |
For a buyer choosing between Jolla and Fairphone, the deciding factor is usually the software: Fairphone gives the user a standard Android experience with a repairable body, while Jolla gives the user a Linux phone with a smaller but fully open software stack. Against the iPhone, the comparison is starker still; Jolla phones are compact, repairable, and run an operating system whose source code is published, qualities that Apple has not offered in any device in its product line since the original iPhone launched in 2007. Reviewers on sites such as GSMArena have consistently noted that Jolla's hardware is competitive in the compact-phone class, while the software ecosystem remains the limiting factor for mainstream adoption.
The people and the platform after Nokia
The Jolla team that wrote the first lines of Sailfish OS included engineers who had contributed to the MeeGo stack at Nokia and to the Maemo community on forums that ran from 2005 to 2014. Among the most visible names in that group is the developer community that maintained the maemo.org repository, which hosted over 4,000 packages for the N900 at its peak and remained the reference point for anyone who wanted to understand how a Debian-based mobile system was assembled. After the 2013 sale, several of those engineers moved into Jolla's Helsinki office, and the company's early releases carried their fingerprints in the kernel configuration, the Qt version choices, and the package manager behavior that Sailfish OS still uses. The community side of the project continues through public Git repositories, a developer forum where users file feature requests and bug reports, and a documentation site that publishes the full Sailfish SDK reference. The platform's future is uncertain in the way that any small phone company's future is uncertain, but the code is public, the community is active, and the lineage from the 2005 N800 to the 2018 Jolla 2 is unbroken, which is the same lineage this site exists to document.