Russia wishes to develop a new mobile operating system (OS) using open source tools, according to a recent statement earlier this month by Nikolay Nikiforov, the Minister of Telecom and Mass Communications.
The plans for it to go on the market will be more likely to be successful if Russia’s partners support it. The top partners for the country are India, China, Brazil, and South Africa. The recent announcement of the mobile plan is echoing recent efforts of China to move into a more global market for its IT software and other products or services.
The OS being launched from Russia is called Sailfish. It is open source and is for mobile devices. The operating system has been developed by Jolla, which is a Finish manufacturer of mobile devices.
While Jolla has only about a one percent presence in Russia’s IT market, it is close to being an international organization, at least according to Nikiforov. It is international as it is Finnish-owned but has investors from Russia and China. If Russia’s partners enter into the mobile strategy, then other notable shareholders will soon be Brazilian, Indian, and South African.
As per Nikiforov, one part of the strategy may be to offer developers monetary grants in return for porting their apps to a Sailfish OS. Of course, the question that comes to mind is whether Sailfish will be able to compete with iOS or Android in the US?
The launch funding will likely play a big part in whether the US market is accepting of the Russian mobile OS. A concern that has already come up amongst developers is how secure are the apps that will be on the Sailfish operating system. The security issue is with apps on smartphones; that security is not directly tied to the OS. Interestingly, Sailfish is compatible with Android and can run Android apps.