Sailfish OS is a Linux-based mobile operating system that rose out of the ashes of the abandoned MeeGo project. It has a unique look and feel and the polish you’d expect from the team of former Nokia employees who founded Jolla Mobile. But what about apps?
No problem — Sailfish now officially supports Android apps. They don’t need to be modified at all in order to run on Sailfish.
Jolla says Sailfish users will be able to download Android apps from “various app stores.” Odds are any phone or tablet you buy with Sailfish will come with an app store pre-loaded, and it sounds like you may be able to download native Sailfish apps or Android apps, which opens the possibility of accessing the hundreds of thousands of apps already available for Android.
What’s less clear is if you’ll be able to use the Google Play Store, Amazon Appstore, or other existing app stores for Android.
Sailfish doesn’t just support Android apps — it also supports the hardware used in common Android phones and tablets, which should make it simple for device makers to offer models running Jolla’s operating system. I suspect it’ll also make it easy for custom ROM builders to port Sailfish to run on existing Android phones and tablets.
Earlier this summer the Jolla team concluded a first round of pre-orders for the first Sailfish smartphone. The team says it plans to open a second round of pre-orders this week.
via reddit
It is great strategy that they support running Android applications.
Without this, no new mobile operating system will be successful.
Canonical should take note and provide full Android compatibility in Ubuntu Mobile.
So what is the point of devs. Jolla..so that I can use Androids apps?
Brilliant. This was the path that Elop decided should die because it would not be part of an ecosystem. Depends on the definition of ecosystem. Will be interesting to follow, although I just removed the Jolla forum RSS feed because it was almost all in Finnish.
I love Sailfish!!!