Jolla Mobile plans to start shipping the first phones running its open source Sailfish OS by the end of 2013. But a smartphone’s only as good as the apps it can run — and Jolla’s getting ready to make sure there are some third party apps available at launch.
The company is now accepting app submissions from developers and outlining plans to open the Jolla Store for apps.
Developers can submit native Sailfish apps as well as Android apps, since the operating system will be able to support Android software. This means that many developers will be able to make existing apps available with little to no extra work — although Sailfish is a different operating system with its own notifications, power management, multitasking, and other features. So users will probably have the best experience with apps designed specifically for Sailfish.
At launch, the Jolla Store will only offer free applications, but the team plans to add support for paid apps in the future.
The app submission service is called Jolla Harbour, and members of the Jolla team plan to perform quality assurance tests on apps and provide feedback to developers rather than just dumping all submitted apps into the Jolla Store.
via Hacker News
Sailfish will be swimming upstream in this river of new phone OSes.
Sorry, had to be said.
I feel that way too, but competition is good!
I know, but there are advantages OEMs and Jolla can tell consumers: no servers online = no NSA spying
Yes and no…
It will really depend on how well the droid apps work initially.
If that goes smoothly then they will be a viable choice and users
will not be losing anything.
The app hurdle I think is the biggest thing for their initial momentum.
The device and its UI is refreshing and new.
open and uncluttered.
I think there are a lot of unix fans out there that use droid for lack of a better option