Sailfish X is out today. Flashed mine this morning. €49.90 gets you a license to install Sailfish OS on a Sony Xperia X you already own. That’s the whole product. No hardware from Jolla, just an image and a set of proprietary bits that don’t ship in the free community build.
The installation works if you’ve ever used fastboot. Unlock the Sony bootloader, run the flash tool, push the image, reboot. The Xperia X is the target because Sony runs an Open Devices program that publishes kernel sources and bootloader unlock tools for this stuff. They’re essentially the only major Android OEM that does this consistently. No formal partnership with Jolla, Jolla is just using a public program. Convenient for both of them.
The €49.90 buys the Android app compatibility layer (Alien Dalvik), predictive text, the Jolla store, and Exchange support. Without the license you can still build and flash the community edition, but you don’t get any of that, which means you don’t have a working Android app story, which means you have a phone with a nearly empty app store. The license is the product. The OS is the shell around it.
On the actual hardware, Sailfish runs well. Battery held up through a full day. The gesture navigation that I spent most of my 2013 review talking about still holds up and feels more natural on a more modern display. Android app compatibility is noticeably more stable than it was on the original Jolla Phone. These are the expected improvements four years later. None of it is what I find interesting about today.
What I find interesting is that Jolla is selling this to European tech enthusiasts as an independent mobile OS while the revenue that actually keeps the company running appears to be a Russian state licensing deal. Open Mobile Platform, a Russian company, has been shipping a Sailfish fork for government procurement for a while. That deal isn’t secret, it’s been in the Finnish press. It’s also not something Jolla talks about when they’re pitching Sailfish X to people who care about owning their data.
I’m not saying it’s wrong. A thirty-person software company in Helsinki taking revenue from where revenue is available is not a scandal. But the customer who buys Sailfish X because they don’t want their phone OS controlled by American platform companies should know that the company selling it to them is financially dependent on a Russian state contract. Those are both true at the same time. How that reads depends entirely on how the geopolitics move, and I have no idea how they move.
Sailfish X as a product is the right shape for a company that came out of a restructuring and has no path back to making hardware. Whether €49.90 licenses from enthusiasts plus government contracts adds up to a real business long-term is a different calculation than whether today’s release is worth buying. For anyone who wants Sailfish on supported hardware: yes, buy it. For what Jolla’s financial picture looks like in three years: genuinely unclear.
Update June 2026: The geopolitics moved. The Russian state fork got rebranded as Aurora OS in 2019. Then February 2022 happened and the whole arrangement became legally untenable. By 2021 Jolla was doubling down on European procurement while Aurora revenue was still running. Two years of legal work to separate from Russian operations followed. And in 2026, Commodore picked Sailfish for the Callback flip phone. The contradiction I couldn’t resolve in 2017 resolved itself, just not cleanly.