A new decade for Sailfish OS

As the year 2020 and a new decade are just around the corner I’d like to thank all our partners, customers, community members, and fellow sailors across the world for being part of the world-changing Jolla Sailfish story for another year. Not only was 2019 a good year but the entire decade has also been a wild ride for us together. Sincere thanks for sailing it with us!

Our dear Sailfish OS, and our company Jolla is steadily approaching an age of 10 years. Most of you know the history. Already from the start we had a bold vision of offering the world a transparent, trusted and privacy-preserving independent alternative for the most personal tech device we use to manage our daily lives – the smartphone. This is the vision we’ve been carrying through all stages of the story, from developing and offering Jolla branded devices in the early days, to the licensing business we’ve been pushing for the past few years.

We are mobile and tech enthusiasts who want to build and develop a mobile operating system we want to use ourselves, and to perfect Sailfish OS for our licensing customers. In parallel we’ve created the Sailfish X program to carry on the Jolla device heritage for all you like-minded people who want to be independent from the big players, who cherish privacy and data integrity, and who simply just enjoy being boldly different!

Strong partnerships and rigorous deep development

The Sailfish OS product is in great shape, and during this year we have released all together six (6!) new Sailfish 3 software releases and six SDK releases. These releases have included enhancements and major features for security, overall user experience, application handling and redesign of some core Sailfish apps. During 2019 we also released a totally rearchitected version of our unique Android-apps-on-native-Linux app support, now including support for Android 8.1 level apps for compatible Sailfish devices. We also launched support for the Sony Xperia 10, our first device to come with user data encryption enabled by default.

Implementing user data encryption has also been a major effort including changes to many different areas of the device. System startup, alarms, emergency calls, system upgrades, and many other areas were impacted by these changes, which required over 12 months of work.

During 2019 our partnership with Open Mobile Platform (OMP) in Russia advanced significantly, and the project has taken great steps forward. Some of the news is available on OMP’s web page.

What to expect in 2020?

Our expectations for the year include new licensing customers, a rapidly growing number of new Sailfish OS users both through our licensing customers and the Sailfish X community program. We will continue to develop the product to match and exceed the needs of our customers, and also to enhance the day-to-day experience for all Sailfish users.

Our 2020 Roadmap includes improving security architecture for UI, privacy-preserving multi-user support, and new enablers for cloud-based services, to name a few. In addition, our product roadmap includes several important updates for Sailfish OS developers. We will be updating our compiler toolchain, working to improve the SDK, and to offer more APIs with documentation to better serve our developers in creating native Sailfish OS apps. We’re also working to enhance communication between all Sailfish OS developers by introducing updates to our online discussion tools.

While development is continuing at an increased pace, we are also working on new licensing partnerships in new countries. These cases take a lot of time to push through, and we will be working hard to bring these up and live during the first half of 2020.

We are now at a great starting point for another Sailfish decade to come. I want to use this opportunity to thank all Sailfish partners and fans for the past decade and wish the best of success to us all. Happy New Year and decade everyone!

Your captain sincerely,
Sami

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