Jolla continues to challenge the American mobile duopoly

Software or hardware? Finnish mobile device and Sailfish OS maker Jolla has always intended doing both. But that could be changing. Today the company announced it’s forking itself, splitting its business into two. One of those businesses will be fully focused on pushing its Sailfish software platform forward. “Every young company has to find its clear focus at some time, and for Jolla that time is now,” said Jolla board chairman, Dr. Antti Saarnio, commenting on the changes in a statement. “We have huge opportunities in the Sailfish OS licensing business… After three years of intensive Sailfish OS research development we are now moving full speed to new bigger waters, which requires full focus on software from the team.” The split follows a strategic push by the company towards forming regional partnerships to develop locally flavored versions of its Sailfish OS in the BRICS emerging markets. The opportunity it sees being to offer an OS that supports more localization than Google’s dominant Android OS affords, given the latter’s focus on promoting Google services (whereas Sailfish-based devices could be tightly integrated with local ecommerce players and the like).