Sailfish OS is a Linux-based operating system designed for smartphones and other mobile devices. It’s based on the discontinued MeeGo Linux, includes a gesture-based user interface, and comes from the folks at Finnish company Jolla Mobile, which was founded by former Nokia execs.

The first Jolla smartphone went on sale this week — but soon you might not need a Jolla device to run Sailfish. Jolla CEO Tomi Pienimäki tells Talouselämä Magazine that soon you’ll be able to install Sailfish on devices that ship with Google Android.

Jolla smartphone

Jolla wouldn’t be the first company to take this approach. Canonical’s Ubuntu Touch operating system can run on Android phones, and the company is basically treating Google’s Nexus phones and tablets as developer devices for the mobile version of Ubuntu.

Basically if you can unlock the bootloader and load custom firmware on your device, there’s no reason that you’d be stuck running Android.

One of the things that sets Sailfish apart from Ubuntu though is that you can actually run Android apps in Sailfish. While native Sailfish apps will probably do a better job of tying into the operating system, there are around a million apps available for Android, which means that there should be no shortage of apps available to run on Sailfish if you decided to install the OS on your device (or buy a phone that ships with the operating system).

While you won’t be able to download apps from the Google Play Store if you’re using Sailfish, you can install third party marketplaces like the Amazon Appstore.

via /r/Android

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22 replies on “Coming soon: Install Sailfish OS on your Android phone or tablet”

  1. I would like to know if this os has the same criminal activities as the Android OS, whether it takes over the user rights and deny the actual owner of the phone to control which apps or information owner wants to share?
    Does it have user protection from data theft?
    does it has app wise internet access, file/folder access, and special individual function access options for the user.

    These were the default options available for everyone on a smart phone before iphone and android, every single app had to seek permission at runtime from the owner for sms access, file access, internet access, etc.
    all the permissions were owner revocable at any time.

  3. Maemo 5 was the best phone OS I’ve ever used. A proper and true mobile linux experience. Not sure why we aren’t building upon that OS instead.

    1. I Heard the community is working on that its been successfully installed on the n950 so a port is not to far off

  6. Act now, you can be the second person in the world who uses yet another funky Linux based OS!

    1. When pre-orders opened to sell a limited amount, people from over 100 countries wanted it but it was only available in certain European countries. Also, all the available pre-orders were sold out.

      1. Just because volume to sale was 400 (four hundreds) devices, it wasn’t?

    2. Does is really matter? I bet most people only want FacebookTwitterWazeWhatsApp on their smartphones with some regional bias towards two to three other extra apps… I know as long as I can get those going, I wouldn’t mind much else.

      1. actually it sort of does some company’s have resorted to funneling services that have no apps into the os itself like how blackberry treats Facebook and Nokia and its fastlane

      1. no its not enough linux based as in it does not need linux, it can work the same on any os that can run jvm code, infact it has done more harm to linux and its name than anything else

  7. Does Sailfish support external keyboards well? I’d like to put this on a Droid 4.

    1. Sailfish is pretty garbage so far, just like Meego. Add an HDMI cable,and plug that droid 4 into a tv. Make a useful computer!

      1. You’ve used it? What were the issues that you had? I’m mostly interested in the terminal, the Bash shell and what command line utilities come with out of the box. Also, I’d like know how the browser performs in terms of performance and website rendering. Did you test these?

        1. I Don’t know much about Sailfish os but I do know if you have any questions And your a Google plus user you can address it to them Ubuntu touch also comes with a terminal preinstalled and has a browser based on open source chromium
          I believe the sailfish browser is pretty much the same as it was on meego with a new ui

      2. I wouldn’t say its garbage but I assumed it would have more developers when it started it had more of a following on google plus then Ubuntu touch or tizen but I guess that went bellyup for there are barely any apps avialble

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