Ministry of Communications officially endorsed Sailfish OS as an alternative to Android

The Finnish company Jolla has achieved approval of its operating system for Sailfish OS mobile devices by the Ministry of Communications and other Russian departments. According to the company, Sailfish OS was recently added to the Unified Registry of computer software and databases, and as a mobile platform it was approved for use in mobile device projects for government agencies and state-controlled organizations and corporations.

“The Russian government has a list of software that can be classified as national software and has been checked, certified and entered in the registry, and in this registry our software is the only mobile OS,” Jolla spokesman for TechCrunch commented on the situation.

Jolla is a company that consists mostly of former Nokia employees. The team is developing an alternative platform for mobile devices running its own OS Sailfish. A feature of Sailfish is its own platform with the ability to emulate the Android OS environment to fill gaps in software and applications for users. The OS from the Finns is the heir of Mer and Meego . At the same time, Jolla positions itself as an independent organization.
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The release date for devices running Sailfish was called the end of 2016. At the same time, the Finns are already waiting on the Russian market and in the state segment: as early as 2015, the Russian government announced that it would set a goal to reduce the share of devices running Android and iOS from 95 to 50 percent by 2025.

The main target audience of Finnish vehicles running Sailfish is now called the public sector. The fork of the operating system for distribution on the territory of Russia (Sailfish OS RUS) satisfies all security requirements for possible alternatives to Android and iOS from the government, regulatory and supervisory authorities.

The situation with the Finns and their operating system could look like another attempt to “impose substitution” at fabulous prices, but it is fundamentally different from the same story with “iotaphones” by several parameters at once.

The first is that Sailfish OS was initially developed as a commercial product, which already successfully entered the European market in the middle of this year. Secondly, the Finns managed to reach agreement with the Ministry of Communications and other regulators and satisfy their requirements, while maintaining their product in the proper form. And third, Sailfish OS is actually viable by emulating the Android environment and accessing the application ecosystem through this “crutch”.

At the same time, the requirements of the Ministry of Communications were not fantastic. Sailfish OS and Jolla only satisfied the requirement of the Russian legislation regarding the storage of personal data. If in the case of iOS and Android, data is duplicated on Apple and Google servers, then in Sailfish OS they remain on the user's device and do not go beyond the jurisdiction of the Russian Federation.

Grigory Bobuk Bakunov commented on the approval of Sailfish OS in his telegram channel:

I almost missed it - the guys from Jolla, along with their Russian friends, finally got the approval of the Ministry of Communications and other parts of the government. Now Sailfish OS is the first "alternative OS" for mobile, approved by the government. And before you start laughing there, you would first try. I used their OS on the old nexus and on their own phone - this is quite an independent and quite good operating system. The main problem in it is the lack of software, which is solved by installing a very good (their own development based on alien dalvik) of the Android emulator. In short, I’m for Anti and the sailfish team are very happy, I communicate a lot with them, I hope that they will succeed!

Jolla notes that the Russian version of Sailfish is not a standalone product in their OS line. In fact, the Finns plan to create the necessary add-ons for individual markets, while leaving the core code unchanged. The approval of Sailfish OS in Russia is regarded by the Jolla management as the first step. They plan to do the same in other BRICS countries , which "include" such large states with actively developing markets like Brazil, India and China. It should be noted that in all these countries, as in Russia, the dominant mobile OS is Android.