Jolla Phone (October 2026)

Wanted to mention that Sailfish has a lot of closed-source components, especially UI-related, despite the overall marketing/"vibe" making it look very open. If anything, AOSP (Android) is more open than Sailfish. I don't think this has changed with Sailfish 5, see e.g.:

- https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/sailfish-os-clarifying-claims...

- https://docs.sailfishos.org/Develop/Open_Source/

Personal experience with Jolla: I bought their first mobile (still have it somewhere) that would be a "Linux Phone that run android app". Wanted to support it and was ready to expect some bugs but it did not work all. No support at all, most of android app did not work. The OS was not finished that it was already obsolete. And now there are doing it again like the first one never existed. I have zero trust in this company

Careful with preordering, they seem to ignore requests to cancel & the community is rather hostile to any form of criticism

Went from iPhone (with PostMarketOS on PinePhones as tests) to /e/OS on a CMF Nothing installed by Murena to GrapheneOS on 2nd hand Pixel 8.

I'm not advocating any of those specifically but I do recommend you take whatever step you are comfortable with to a saner mobile technology lifestyle.

IMHO it's a worthwhile learning journey that is probably less challenging and more empowering than you can imagine.

> European alternative

What about the regulatory side where all of Europe is starting to require stock Android or iOS to even have an ID card?

Their branding & website looks like a generic fake shop that was created in 30 mins for testing or scamming

I ordered two in the September batch, which was way less expensive.

Jolla phones are fine. I have friends who use it every day. Happy to support them all the best I can.

—— Sent from my iPhone 17 Pro

750 USD? I like the idea. And appreciate all the people who support such products, so phones are getting cheaper. But no way I'm getting it for over $150. It looks really cheap, and the marketing is bad, honestly. I think these corporations have spoiled me, and I was really looking for huuuuge wow effect for $750, but it's just a Linux phone.

Who designed such ridiculous camera bump? It would be a really nice device, if only it had a flat backside.

I got first Jolla Phone ages ago, wanted to love it but in the end I disliked it bebause of gesture-oriented UI (it simply didn't 'click' for me and was annoying to use in the long run).

Right now I'm more excited about PostmarketOS which seems to be more vanilla Linux with more approachable UI…

Have they unlocked the bootloader? Can I install a different OS on it?

I like the idea of these new phones that might be a bit more privacy centered, and even with some different OSes but I think the biggest problem for a lot of adoption is the compatibility with things like banking apps, 2fa etc. It makes it quite an impossible daily driver thanks to some strange rules.

Ship to the US with GrapheneOS and I'll be first in line :)

I hope Ubuntu Touch has native support for this, as it's a great OS with massive potential and active community.

If this Sailfish phone is 700 and Commodore's is 500, I know which Sailfish device I can pay attention to.

Does anyone know when they'll sell their company and product to russia again?

I hope it eats you if you don't wear your Christmas clothes

Is there anybody out there making a thin client device that runs almost everything remotely?

Basically a screen, battery and LTE chip with microSD storage for times

The way most people use phones are functionally useless without internet, so thats already a critical requirement and having the “phone” part of it you can do with 5c of hardware and free software.

What does "Assembled in Finland" mean?

Another almost good phone without a mini jack :( User-replaceable battery, SD card port, mini jack, touchscreen that works consistently. Do I really ask for that much?

Google is so anti open it's the new Microsoft. I hope for a day when my phone runs nixos with Qt apps. Qt is so much better than java that I'm sure I'll be able to make do in 4gb what android takes 16gb for.

In the era of hallucinated apps, this doesn't even seen like an imaginary wishful scenario.

why this over Fairphone?

> 99€ down payment to lock your October delivery

...

I still can't take a device with a mid-range Mediatek seriously. Probably from my XDA days, where just its presence meant locked bootloaders and no kernel sources.

Congrats on selling them but "assembled in EU" can't be the main selling point.

Careful with preordering, they seem to ignore requests to cancel & the community is rather hostile to any form of criticism

Have they unlocked the bootloader? Can I install a different OS on it?

I hope Ubuntu Touch has native support for this, as it's a great OS with massive potential and active community.

If this Sailfish phone is 700 and Commodore's is 500, I know which Sailfish device I can pay attention to.

I hope it eats you if you don't wear your Christmas clothes

Another almost good phone without a mini jack :( User-replaceable battery, SD card port, mini jack, touchscreen that works consistently. Do I really ask for that much?

In the era of hallucinated apps, this doesn't even seen like an imaginary wishful scenario.

> 99€ down payment to lock your October delivery

...

I still can't take a device with a mid-range Mediatek seriously. Probably from my XDA days, where just its presence meant locked bootloaders and no kernel sources.

Congrats on selling them but "assembled in EU" can't be the main selling point.

- https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/sailfish-os-clarifying-claims...

- https://docs.sailfishos.org/Develop/Open_Source/

Huh. I really don't see the point of this, vs something like GrapheneOS.

I still have my first Jolla from 2016. Still works and got updates till 2 years ago. The android stuff I used was minimal but worked fine except for bluetooth and nfc. I build my own mostly.

Unfortunately for the foreseeable future you'd need a cheap Android or iOS device for those apps and whatever you want as daily driver.

I don't think you NEED to open your online banking on your phone every day. Just use cash and cards.

2FA should be easily available on any OS

There's a compatibility list at https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compa....

I think the challenges here exist but the reality is overblown to be honest, the vast majority of banking apps (everything that isn't struck through in that list) work just fine.

Fully agree the concern is discouraging adoption though. I would love to see more of a solution here, it seems like purely anti-competitive behaviour by Android that will block competitors emerging.

Perhaps my bank is special (Triodos), its app works just fine on the Jolla.

Does anyone know when they'll sell their company and product to russia again?

After they make Zelensky pres.

What does "Assembled in Finland" mean?

Probably things like fixing the mainboards to the casing, putting in batteries, back covers, flashing the software, running hw tests, packaging etc.

Stuff gets put together in Finland to form the final device they ship, even if the parts aren't made in Finland. I think a dictionary lookup for "assemble" might help if this explanation did not.

why this over Fairphone?

Mal, from Jolla has ports to from the 2 till the 5, I believe. I used an FP2 for about a year. Big difference is andoid app support, not present on the fp ohones.

I still have my first Jolla from 2016. Still works and got updates till 2 years ago. The android stuff I used was minimal but worked fine except for bluetooth and nfc. I build my own mostly.

Unfortunately for the foreseeable future you'd need a cheap Android or iOS device for those apps and whatever you want as daily driver.

I don't think you NEED to open your online banking on your phone every day. Just use cash and cards.

2FA should be easily available on any OS

There's a compatibility list at https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compa....

I think the challenges here exist but the reality is overblown to be honest, the vast majority of banking apps (everything that isn't struck through in that list) work just fine.

Fully agree the concern is discouraging adoption though. I would love to see more of a solution here, it seems like purely anti-competitive behaviour by Android that will block competitors emerging.

Perhaps my bank is special (Triodos), its app works just fine on the Jolla.

After they make Zelensky pres.

Probably things like fixing the mainboards to the casing, putting in batteries, back covers, flashing the software, running hw tests, packaging etc.

Stuff gets put together in Finland to form the final device they ship, even if the parts aren't made in Finland. I think a dictionary lookup for "assemble" might help if this explanation did not.

I read it as "how much is actually assembled in Finland versus arriving pre-assembled?"

the pieces of the phone are put together in the country of finland

Mal, from Jolla has ports to from the 2 till the 5, I believe. I used an FP2 for about a year. Big difference is andoid app support, not present on the fp ohones.

> It's still more open than AOSP

I don't think this is true at all? AOSP is completely open source modulo driver blobs (which Sailfish has too) and Google services.

One can make a fully functional system, modulo drivers, out of only open-source components using AOSP. It's not possible to do this using Sailfish; the compositor, UI libraries (Silica), and most of the "core" apps are still closed source.

I think you mean less. Since AOSP is fully open?

Huh. I really don't see the point of this, vs something like GrapheneOS.

My xperia 10 iii was 280€(+50€ OS) vs 500€++ for a pixel.

But I hate phones. i want is navigation, sms/call, signal and steam.

If what you want is android and you have privacy concerns, GrapheneOS is probably the best you can get.

Then again, SailfishOS is a linux with much of the usual linux stuff like userland with bash, coreutils, glibc, systemd, wayland, pulseaudio etc.

/etc configuration instead of the insanely bad system properties crap, glibc instead of bionic (which has even worse POSIX compliance than Windows), ld instead of linker, FHS, not having a batshit insane No-Sockets rule, not needing to port software that already compiles and runs on GNU/Linux, X11/Wayland/Arcan, system services aren't entangled with Java, normal IPC mechanisms instead whatever the fuck blender is. The list goes on.

Android (and by extension GrapheneOS) uses Linux as a kernel, but it lives in its own world and is completely unrecognizable. I'd say it's even more alien than macOS. For most users, the differences don't matter. If you're a programmer or a sysadmin with reasonable expectations, you feel like a fish out of water very fast. And I really cannot say that the experience is changed for the better.

I read somewhere that the owners have ties to russia, but the most important thing is that they’re marketing very aggressively through posts that slander GraphenOS.

> It's still more open than AOSP

I don't think this is true at all? AOSP is completely open source modulo driver blobs (which Sailfish has too) and Google services.

My xperia 10 iii was 280€(+50€ OS) vs 500€++ for a pixel.

But I hate phones. i want is navigation, sms/call, signal and steam.

I think you mean less. Since AOSP is fully open?

If what you want is android and you have privacy concerns, GrapheneOS is probably the best you can get.

Then again, SailfishOS is a linux with much of the usual linux stuff like userland with bash, coreutils, glibc, systemd, wayland, pulseaudio etc.

I ordered two in the September batch, which was way less expensive.

Jolla phones are fine. I have friends who use it every day. Happy to support them all the best I can.

—— Sent from my iPhone 17 Pro

Well, assembly can mean that a pick and place machine is assembling individual capacitors onto a raw circuit board, or it can mean a teenager putting the battery in and putting the battery cover on before packaging it. That’s why “look it up in a dictionary” comments aren’t helpful. We aren’t confused about the word, we are confused what it means in this use because it can have a VERY broad definition.

Pick and place PCB assembly is very different from the final assembly of batteries in terms of who is capturing value and building a reasonable moat. Their sales angle is around European autonomy.

Low wage workers putting batteries in phones is not that, but PCB assembly is much closer to that.

I read it as "how much is actually assembled in Finland versus arriving pre-assembled?"

the pieces of the phone are put together in the country of finland

Yes, but which pieces are put together there and which are already assembled elsewhere?

I think he was asking about advantages, not "how is it similar to a Unix system from the 80s?"

I read somewhere that the owners have ties to russia, but the most important thing is that they’re marketing very aggressively through posts that slander GraphenOS.

> they’re marketing very aggressively through posts that slander GraphenOS

I would really appreciate it if you could give some references - any at all - to back this claim.

All I have seen is GrapheneOS folks (or probably just a certain individual affiliated with the GrapheneOS org) accusing them of doing this.

Jesus christ, what is this FUD?

I know the people behind SailfishOS, they’re not like, friends or anything: just ex-Nokia developers who got fucked by Microsoft (like I did, btw, which is how I know of them).

I feel like the big tech smartphone duopoly would have a reason to spread such rubbish, but its so patently obvious that I doubt they are so stupid.