Jolla's Sailfish OS to be made available for Sony's Xperia phones

Finnish company Jolla, the company behind the Linux-based Sailfish OS, has announced a new partnership with Sony at the 2017 Mobile World Congress trade show. Jolla will release special versions of Sailfish specifically for Sony’s lineup of Xperia phones, which normally use Android.

The partnership is being handled by Sony’s Open Devices program, in order to ensure that Sailfish will work well with its phones. The project will begin with a version of Sailfish OS made for the Xperia X phone, and is scheduled to be released sometime before the end of the second quarter of 2017.

In related news, Jolla revealed it has signed an agreement with an unnamed consortium in China to product a local operating system, based on Sailfish OS, for the Chinese market. This consortium aims to invest $250 million in Jolla to help develop this product. This news comes a few months after Jolla revealed that Sailfish had become the first mobile OS to receive domestic certification for corporate use by the government of Russia.

Both of these developments, combined with news that Sony’s Xperia phones will soon be officially compatible with Sailfish, could make the OS a more viable competitor to Android, especially in those large markets of Russia and China. It remains to be seen if Jolla can use this money and momentum to truly make a dent in Android’s market share.