MeeGo
MeeGo is the Linux mobile operating system that Nokia and Intel announced on 28 October 2010, merging Nokia's Maemo and the Nokia Linux line with Intel's Moblin to build the successor that was planned for the N9. The project folded into a larger alliance in 2011, the device that carried it died in 2012, and the people behind it went on to found Jolla and ship Sailfish OS, so the name survives mostly as a marker of the road not taken.
The first paragraph above answers the question that most of this page's visitors arrive with. What follows is the history of MeeGo itself: the merger, the releases, the ending, and the identity cleanup that happened afterward, because "MeeGo" is also the name of an unrelated modern app and a common source of confusion.
How MeeGo formed
MeeGo formed from two projects that both wanted to be a phone Linux in the same year, and the merger that created it was announced at a joint press event in Helsinki on 28 October 2010. Nokia contributed the Maemo and the Nokia Linux line, a Debian-based platform that had shipped since the Nokia 770 internet tablet of 2005 and the N800 and N810 of 2006, and that had matured into the Maemo 5 release that powered the N900 in 2009. Intel contributed Moblin, the Linux distribution Intel had been building for netbooks and for what it called the "meego" class of handheld device, and the new group placed the whole thing under the Linux Foundation as a neutral home.
The naming was a compromise with a typo in it. The project was originally intended to be called MeeGo, a coined blend, and the extra "e" that made it MeeGo stuck for the life of the project. That small accident is why a search today returns two unrelated things, so the sections below keep the operating system and the app strictly separate.
- Nokia's contribution: Maemo, the Debian-based tablet and phone platform behind the 770, N800, N810 and N900.
- Intel's contribution: Moblin, its Linux base for handheld and netbook devices.
- Stewardship: the Linux Foundation, which took the merged project under its umbrella in 2010.
MeeGo releases and the N9
The MeeGo release that actually shipped hardware was Harmattan, the platform the N9 ran when it appeared on shelves in the fall of 2011. The N9 was a 116 gram polycarbonate phone with a 3.9 inch display, a 680 MHz to 1 GHz Intel Moorefield processor, 1 GB of RAM, a 14.5 megapixel rear camera, and a 1450 mAh battery, and it ran Harmattan with the Qt Quick based UI that the Maemo team had designed, the same toolkit family that the earlier N900 had used in a different form. Harmattan shipped with a browser, a file manager, an app catalog, and developer tooling that let a Qt application be built for the phone in a day. The developer edition and the public release followed a short gap in the autumn of 2011, and the final MeeGo update for the N9 arrived in 2012 before the platform stopped receiving support.
Two more MeeGo forms existed without shipping to consumers in the same year. MeeGo for tablets was the branch aimed at a tablet device, and it was the branch that Intel continued to work on after the phone side died, and MeeGo for embedded was the branch that pointed at in-car and appliance use. A community maintained branch also kept building MeeGo sources for years, and an emulator image made the platform testable on a desktop, which is how most of the remaining developer work happened after 2012.
| Release | Target | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Harmattan (2011, on the N9) | Smartphone | Shipped as retail hardware; ended with the N9 in 2012 |
| MeeGo for tablets | Tablet | No retail device; folded into the Tizen direction |
| MeeGo for embedded | In-vehicle and appliance | Continued as an Intel effort after the phone project ended |
| Community builds (2012 onward) | N9 and desktop emulator | Maintained the platform for existing owners |
MeeGo versus Android
MeeGo versus Android was never a contest of installed base, and the honest comparison is about design philosophy, not market share. Android was a full Linux kernel userland that Google controlled end to end, with an application marketplace, a global app store, and the distribution muscle of every manufacturer that licensed it. MeeGo was a smaller Linux userland built around Qt, with a hand crafted interface and a developer experience aimed at a single company's phone. The practical differences for a user in 2011 fell into 4 groups: interface language, application supply, update control, and hardware fit.
| Dimension | MeeGo (N9, Harmattan) | Android (contemporary devices) |
|---|---|---|
| Interface | Qt Quick, gesture centric, a single hand crafted theme | Java and native layers, a per manufacturer themed shell |
| App supply | A small catalog and a community repository; developers could build with Qt or port with a bridge | The Google Play catalog, tens of thousands of apps at launch scale |
| Updates | One vendor, one device, a short update window ending in 2012 | Staggered vendor and carrier updates across many models |
| Hardware | The N9, a 116 gram polycarbonate body, a 3.9 inch display, 1 GB of RAM | Dozens of models across price points |
The N9 remains a benchmark device in phone history, which is a judgment that the market share comparison never made. It also remains the reason the word "MeeGo" still surfaces in emulator discussions: people who want to run a Maemo or MeeGo image on a modern desktop install the emulator and load the image, the same way other retro platforms survive through their emulators.
The ending and the fork into Tizen and the Jolla path
The ending of MeeGo and the fork into Tizen arrived in 2011, in the middle of the platform's first product cycle, when Nokia signed an alliance with Microsoft in September 2011 and committed its phone strategy to Windows Phone. The announcement was a goodbye to the Linux phone line that Maemo had carried since 2005, and it split the surviving MeeGo work in two. Intel and Samsung merged the remaining MeeGo code into Tizen, a new platform that shipped on a Samsung device in 2013 and later on smart displays and televisions, and the former MeeGo team at Nokia left to found Jolla, the company that would turn Harmattan's ideas into Sailfish OS in 2013 and ship the Jolla phone in 2016.
That split is the whole of the modern MeeGo story. Tizen kept the platform side of the project, the embedded and enterprise direction, and Jolla kept the product side, the hand built phone interface that N9 owners recognize immediately. When you look at a Sailfish device today, the MeeGo inheritance is the interface philosophy and part of the technical base, not a running piece of MeeGo itself.
What the name "MeeGo" means now
What the name "MeeGo" means now depends on which search engine result you are holding, because the name is shared by at least 4 unrelated things. The operating system described on this page is one of them, and the others explain why so many modern search queries about MeeGo have nothing to do with Nokia.
- The MeeGo operating system, the Nokia Intel Linux platform from 2010 to 2011.
- The MeeGo app, a modern mobile application that borrows the name, found through app stores and web search, unrelated to the operating system.
- Meegoda, the community forum for Maemo and MeeGo, where the project's developers and owners still post.
- People, brands and products that use the spelling "MeeGo" for clothing, furniture, music and social accounts.
For the app specifically, the short answers are: it is a separate commercial product, not an official MeeGo application and not an operating system; whether it is legitimate depends on the app store listing, the developer identity, and the permissions it requests, and there is no single answer that fits every store; and if you want the operating system experience, the route is an emulator on a desktop with an image download, not an app store. Nothing on this page hosts firmware, ROMs, or repackaged applications, and it is an independent reference that is not Nokia, not Jolla, not maemo.org, and not the original Maemo Freak blog.
The people and the projects outlive the name better than the name outlives itself. Maemo ran on the 770, the N800, the N810 and the N900; MeeGo ran on the N9; and the lineage continues in Sailfish OS on Jolla hardware. Anyone who finds this page through an old link about a device they once owned, or through a modern search for an app that happens to share the name, lands on the same answer: MeeGo is where the Nokia Linux phone line pointed when Intel joined it, and it stopped pointing in 2011.
Where to start
1. START HEREThe first Jolla PhoneThe Jolla Phone was the first device to ship Sailfish OS, announced in May 2013 and delivered to its first buyers in Helsinki on 27 November 2013.
2. SAILFISH OS DOWNLOADGetting Sailfish OSA Sailfish OS download comes from Jolla and nowhere else: on the supported Sony Xperia models it is a licensed image bundle that you flash over.
3. SAILFISH OS PHONESDevices that run SailfishSailfish OS phones come in three groups: Jolla's own hardware, headed by the Jolla C2 Community Phone announced in 2024.All pages in Meego
ALL PAGES IN MEEGOThe Jolla C2The Jolla C2 Community Phone is a smartphone announced in May 2024 and sold directly by its maker with Sailfish OS already installed and licensed.
ALL PAGES IN MEEGOThe MeeGo interfaceMeeGo OS presented two entirely different interfaces during its short life.
ALL PAGES IN MEEGOSailfish OS versionsSailfish OS versions run in five generations: 1.x from 2013 on the first Jolla Phone, 2.x from 2015, 3.x announced in February 2018.
ALL PAGES IN MEEGOAndroid apps on SailfishSailfish OS apps come in two kinds: native applications written in Qt and QML and installed as RPM packages, and Android applications that run inside.
MEEGO BUILD N900MeeGo on the N900MeeGo builds for the Nokia N900 existed from 2010 onward, first as community images and then as an official developer image shipped alongside MeeGo 1.0.
INTEL NOKIA MEEGOThe industry behind MeeGoIntel and Nokia jointly funded MeeGo from February 2010, Intel to give its Atom processors a credible mobile operating system and Nokia to carry.Other sections
Inherited addresses in this section
/index.php/rumours/1383-nokia-n900-to-get-first-meego-build-later-this-monthMeeGo on the N900/index.php/miscellaneous/1372-intel-and-nokia-merge-software-platforms-for-future-computing-devices-The industry behind MeeGo/index.php/miscellaneous/1412-meego-v10-for-nokia-n900-and-netbooks-now-available-for-downloadMeeGo on the N900/index.php/hacks/1399-first-meego-build-for-nokia-n900-now-available-for-downloadMeeGo on the N900/index.php/miscellaneous/1405-first-glimpse-of-the-meego-user-interface-The MeeGo interface/index.php/tech/1410-weekend-reading-is-it-time-to-take-intel-based-smartphones-seriouslyThe industry behind MeeGo/index.php/miscellaneous/1404-meego-developer-community-grows-as-software-ecosystem-support-broadens-The industry behind MeeGo/index.php/tech/1407-intel-launches-new-atom-processor-for-smartphones-based-on-linux-os-including-meego-and-androidThe industry behind MeeGo/index.php/miscellaneous/1413-arm-freescale-ibm-samsung-st-ericsson-and-texas-instruments-form-new-company-to-speed-the-rollout-of-linux-based-devices-The industry behind MeeGo