Devices that run Sailfish
Sailfish OS phones come in three groups: Jolla’s own hardware, headed by the Jolla C2 Community Phone announced in 2024, the licensed Sony Xperia models Jolla supports through the Sailfish X programme since October 2017, and unofficial community ports that carry no vendor support at all.
Jolla’s own Sailfish OS hardware
Jolla’s own hardware is the shortest of the three lists and the only one where the operating system arrives preinstalled. The company has shipped four products of its own across more than a decade, and the gaps between them are long. The first Jolla Phone reached buyers from 27 November 2013 with a 4.5in 540×960 display, a dual-core Snapdragon 400, 1GB of RAM, 16GB of storage and an 8MP camera, plus the swappable back covers Jolla called The Other Half. The Jolla Tablet followed as an Indiegogo campaign opened in November 2014, with a 7.85in 2048×1536 screen and an Intel Atom processor, but only a fraction of backers ever received one and the rest were refunded after the company’s 2015 restructuring.
The Jolla C of 2016 was a limited run of about 1,000 units sold only to members of the community device programme, effectively a rebadged mid-range handset used to keep a first-party target alive. The Jolla C2 Community Phone, announced in 2024, restarted first-party hardware after an eight-year gap and is the reference device for the current release series. The company’s full corporate history sits on the page for Jolla.
The licensed Sony Xperia phones
The licensed Sony Xperia phones are the backbone of the supported device list, because Sony’s Open Devices programme allows the bootloader to be unlocked officially and publishes the binary blobs a third-party system needs. Jolla sells a per-device licence under the Sailfish X name, the owner flashes the images over the factory Android firmware, and the phone then takes updates over the air from Jolla like a first-party device.
| Device | Maker | Sailfish support began |
|---|---|---|
| Jolla Phone | Jolla | 2013, preinstalled |
| Jolla C | Jolla | 2016, community programme only |
| Xperia X | Sony | October 2017, first Sailfish X release |
| Xperia XA2 family | Sony | 2018 |
| Xperia 10 and 10 Plus | Sony | 2019 |
| Xperia 10 II | Sony | 2021 |
| Xperia 10 III | Sony | 2022 |
| Jolla C2 Community Phone | Jolla | 2024, preinstalled |
Jolla has continued the programme onto later Xperia 10 generations, and the list on Jolla’s own shop is the only version of it worth trusting, because a model that is compatible in principle is not the same as a model with a build you can actually buy. Check the exact model code, since single-SIM and dual-SIM variants of the same Xperia are not always covered by the same image.
Community ports and what they leave out
Community ports extend Sailfish OS to hardware Jolla has never supported, using the hardware adaptation development kit Jolla publishes for exactly that purpose. Ports have appeared for the Fairphone 2, several Xiaomi and OnePlus handsets, the PinePhone, the Samsung Galaxy S4 and a long tail of others, and the porters coordinate through the community wiki rather than through Jolla. A port is free, in the sense that everything in it is open source.
What a port leaves out is consistent and worth stating plainly:
- Android application support, which is proprietary and cannot be redistributed with a community image.
- Predictive text and Microsoft Exchange support, for the same licensing reason.
- Guaranteed hardware coverage, so the camera, the modem, video acceleration or the fingerprint reader may be partly or wholly non-functional.
- Any update commitment, since releases appear when a volunteer produces them.
No iPhone port exists and none is possible in the ordinary sense, because Apple’s bootloader does not permit it. That question comes up often enough to deserve a direct answer.
What supported means on a Sailfish OS phone
Support on a Sailfish OS phone means three specific things rather than one general one. It means Jolla builds and signs an image for that exact model. It means the proprietary components covered by the licence, above all the Android layer, are present and legal on that device. And it means the device continues to receive the over-the-air update that lands when a new release ships. A community port satisfies none of the three, which is not a criticism of the porters but the honest description of what you are taking on.
One further distinction catches buyers. Jolla lists devices as compatible on the basis of a working adaptation, but older models drop off the update path as the underlying vendor kernel ages out. A phone that runs Sailfish is not automatically a phone that runs the current release of Sailfish OS.
How Android apps affect the choice of device
Android apps affect the choice of device more than any specification on the list. The compatibility container is licensed, so it is present on Jolla hardware and on licensed Xperia models and absent from community ports. If the applications you cannot do without are Android applications, the practical device list shrinks to Jolla’s own phones and the Xperia models Jolla currently sells a licence for. Even then, Google Play services are absent by design, so anything depending on Google push messaging or device attestation, banking applications in particular, is likely to fail regardless of which supported handset you pick.
Where this hardware lineage began
The hardware lineage behind these phones begins with Nokia, not with Jolla. Nokia’s internet tablets and then the N900 carried Maemo, the Debian-based Linux this site exists to document, and the single device that carried the platform’s successor was The Nokia N9 of October 2011, with its 3.9in 854×480 AMOLED panel and its button-free swipe interface. That system was branded MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan, and the collapse of the wider programme is set out on the page for MeeGo. The gesture navigation on a Jolla phone is the visible thread running from that device to this one.
This is an independent reference. It is not Nokia, not Jolla, not maemo.org and not the original Maemo Freak blog, and it hosts no firmware, no ROMs and no repackaged applications. Device availability changes; Jolla’s own shop is the authoritative list.