Sailfish OS

Android Users Will Soon Be Able to Install Sailfish OS

When the Jolla phone was announced back in May of 2013 along with Sailfish OS, plenty of us were genuinely interested in the Meego successor. This is probably due to its simplistic and customizable hardware, its ability to run Android apps, and our interest in how Jolla will do things differently. This is evident from the feedback received from the XDA community on the original article, with plenty of comments and discussions.

Fast forward half a year, and the Jolla phone was made available to the European market on the 27 of November, giving people the first taste of Sailfish OS. If you’ve been glancing your eyes towards the new OS with interest, but find yourself comfortable with your current Android device, there’s good news.

The company’s CEO Tomi Pienimäki recently stated in an interview that Jolla is planning to bring the Sailfish experience over to Android owners, and that the process will be quite easy, as indicated with:

“That is the plan. We are on device business and OS business. It is fairly easy to install the OS on Android devices”

As Pienimäki continues:

”There is no such culture in these parts of the world [Finland], but there are people that are installing new operating systems on their devices. In China it is mainstream. About half of the smartphone buyers are upgrading their older or cheaper devices with a better version of Android.”

“For us it is a possibility to distribute our operating system especially in China. There are websites that already distribute [OS] software and the Chinese customers are doing it ¬so we don’t have to teach them. We just have to get Sailfish to those websites – and to make sure that Sailfish will run on different kind of Android devices.”

One consideration when deciding to give Sailfish a whirl on your Android device is LTE compatibility. Although the Jolla phone has LTE components, Sailfish OS does not have LTE compatibility. However, development on LTE support is underway according to Jolla, which probably means by the time Sailfish does make its way over to Android, LTE will no longer be an issue.

Pienimäki did not provide any in depth details on a possible plan and distribution schedule, but we can infer that the plan is still in its early stages, much like Jolla and Sailfish themselves. Despite its infancy, it’ll be great to see this plan develop into actuality.

Are you looking forward to giving Sailfish a try? And if you have your own Jolla phone already, what are your thoughts and impressions? Share them with us below.