Some announcement last week pulled me back into the full Jolla story, and the piece I was missing from the public archive was anything covering what happened between 2022 and now.
Here’s what actually happened in the restructure.
The Pirkanmaa District Court approved the restructuring plan and forced the full sale of Jolla’s business to a new entity on November 24, 2023. The new company is called Jollyboys. That name was not a joke I made up; it’s on the Finnish business registry. The business Jolla had built, the OS, the IP, and the team were transferred to Jollyboys as a clean break. By early 2024, the new entity was operating and working toward a new consumer device, the Jolla C2, which launched later that year.
What triggered it all was February 24, 2022. The EU sanctions packages that followed the invasion made continued financial flows from Russian entities legally unclear, then legally risky, then legally untenable. Open Mobile Platform, which had been licensing Sailfish and running it as Aurora OS for Russian state procurement, was the primary revenue source Jolla was structured around. That relationship needed to end, and it took the rest of 2022 and most of 2023 to end it cleanly without breaching either EU sanctions or Russian commercial law. That’s a real legal problem, and it took the time it took.
Aurora OS still exists and still runs on Russian government phones. Jollyboys has no part in it. The IP separation and the clean break were the point of the whole exercise.
What the company that came out the other side looks like: about 30 people, focused on Sailfish OS for enthusiasts and the European public sector, AppSupport for Linux Platforms for industrial licensing, and a new consumer device, the Jolla C2. The European procurement pipeline that I was skeptical of in 2021 apparently matured into signed contracts in Switzerland and with Finnish defense. Nothing public in detail, but the company survived the revenue loss, which is evidence enough that something replaced it.
The thing that actually changed was not the revenue structure, though that changed too. It was that Jollyboys could now pitch European digital sovereignty without a Russian-state asterisk. That argument has been getting harder to make since 2017, when I wrote about the tension between the European pitch and the Russian revenue. The tension was resolved when the revenue disappeared. That’s not how you want a strategic contradiction to resolve, but it resolved.