Sailfish 5.0 Unveiled: A New Era for Mobile Operating Systems

On February 24, 2025, the company Jollaboys unveiled the mobile operating system Sailfish 5.0, which serves as an alternative to Android and iOS. The project has prepared builds for 16 mobile devices (with 7 additional devices still undergoing support development), including Jolla C2, Sony Xperia 10, and Sony Xperia XA2.

Previously, the Finnish company Jollaboys acquired the assets of Jolla following the bankruptcy of the mobile OS developer.

The release of Sailfish 5.0 marks the first significant update in several years, following the restructuring of Jolla’s business in 2023. This restructuring involved moving certain funds out of Russian investors’ influence through bankruptcy and terminating partnerships with the developers of the Aurora OS.

Founded in 2011 by former Nokia employees, Jolla introduced the Sailfish operating system in 2012, which supported applications designed for Android. In 2016, the Russian company Open Mobile Platform (OMP) obtained rights to develop and utilize Sailfish OS, collaborating with Jolla to create the Sailfish Mobile OS Rus. In 2018, Rostelecom acquired a 75% stake in OMP and shares in Jolla. The following year, Sailfish Mobile OS Rus was rebranded as Aurora OS. In 2022, the Finnish startup Jolla initiated a buyout of its shares from Russian partners, ending its collaboration on Aurora OS development.

According to OpenNET, Sailfish employs a graphical stack based on Wayland and Qt5 libraries, with its system environment built on Mer, which has been developed since April 2019 as part of Sailfish and the Nemo Mer distribution. User interfaces, basic mobile applications, QML components for graphical interface design (Silica), the layer for running Android applications, smart text input engine, and data synchronization system are proprietary, but there were plans to open their source code as early as 2017.

Key updates and enhancements in Sailfish 5.0 include:

— Introduction of support for the personal AI assistant Jolla Mind2 and the Jolla C2 smartphone (which is based on the Turkish smartphone Reeder S19 Max Pro S);

— Added support for the WireGuard VPN;

— A new landscape mode has been implemented;

— A call-blocking feature has been introduced to filter incoming calls from specified numbers;

— Sailfish Browser has been updated to run on the Gecko ESR91 engine, aligned with Firefox 91 (work is ongoing to update to Gecko ESR102);

— The Android compatibility layer has been upgraded to the Android 13 platform;

— Included in the release is the microG 0.3.6 package, offering independent alternatives to Google services.