Sailfish OS’s heritage lies in Nokia times, especially in the MeeGo operating system. Prior to 2011 Nokia and Intel had a vision of an open mobile operating system. Together they invested around 1 billion USD to the project and created an open source based operating system called MeeGo, which was used as a basis for several devices, such as the iconic Nokia N9. Although the Nokia N9 became the beacon of open source operating systems, Nokia decided to end the project and chose instead to continue with Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS. The rest of that is another story. The passionate team behind MeeGo refused to quit working on the project they’ve believed in. They, or currently ‘we’ saved MeeGo by setting up a new company, Jolla Ltd., to develop the swipe-based MeeGo into the flowing user experience that is Sailfish OS. We quickly enhanced Sailfish OS to run Android appsand it became hardware compatible with Android chipsets. In November 2013, we launched the beta version of Sailfish OS to the market with the Jolla smartphone. Shortly after this, we released Sailfish OS version 1.0 and the first Sailfish OS product, the Jolla smartphone entered 36 markets during one year.
After 16 software updates, our OS matured to Sailfish OS 2.0. It was rolled out to current Sailfish OS users in September 2015, and has been developed further ever since.
Sailfish OS has currently tens of thousands of users around the world. Through current licensing partnerships including India’s largest smartphone vendor Intex Technologies, Turing Robotics, Open Mobile Platform, and our community’s Fairphone 2 effort, as well as other upcoming partnerships, the user base is expected to grow significantly in the near future.
