06 Linux on the handset
Sailfish OS
European, gesture-first, and shipped in regulated environments for over a decade.
- Role
- Mobile OS
- Licence
- Mixed — open core
- Since
- 2013
- Upstream
- Project site ↗
Sailfish OS is a Finnish mobile operating system from Jolla. It is built on a Linux base with a gesture-driven interface and has more than a decade of commercial deployment behind it.
Why we still choose it
Of the three options it is the most mature, and it is European. Some organisations care about jurisdiction more than ideology, and for them a mobile platform developed and supported inside the EU is a materially different proposition. Sailfish has been deployed in regulated and government settings on exactly that basis.
The interface is good, not just functional. Gesture navigation and the multitasking model compare well with anything else, and unlike most alternatives it has had ten years of real users finding the rough edges.
Where it fits
Deployments where an organisation wants European vendor support for a handset it controls, and needs Android application compatibility only as a fallback.
Where it falls short
It is open core and not fully open source. Parts of the interface are proprietary, which rules it out for some clients, and we tell them so. The range of supported devices is limited, and licensing for commercial deployment has to be negotiated with Jolla.
Where full openness matters more than vendor support, postmarketOS is the better choice.