Jolla may not be a household name, but for more than a decade the Finnish company has positioned its Linux-based Sailfish OS as an alternative to the mobile software duopoly that is Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS.
Now, 13 years since it tried to cut through the market with the Jolla Phone—a device which remarkably received software updates through 2020—it’s back with a successor of the same name.
This time, the company is positioning its handset as the “European phone.” This bit of marketing caters to the growing distrust in US digital services and platforms that has arisen since Big Tech sidled up to the second Trump administration.
The new Jolla Phone (pronounced “Yolla”) costs €649, mimics the Scandinavian design of the original, and has secured more than 10,000 preorders since its preview in December 2025. Those orders are expected to begin shipping at the end of June. At Mobile World Congress 2026 in Barcelona this week, the company divulged more details about the phone’s hardware.
Alt Android
Jolla has had a turbulent history. After the company floundered the launch of its Jolla Tablet in 2015, it nearly went bankrupt and pivoted to licensing Sailfish OS to automotive companies and governments, including Russia. After the invasion of Ukraine, Jolla had to cut ties with Russia, and a corporate restructuring meant that Jolla’s assets were acquired by the company’s former management under a new company called Jollyboys.
It got back into the smartphone game in 2024 with the Jolla C2 Community Phone, made in collaboration with a local Turkish company, and it was this experience that gave Jolla the courage to jump back into the hardware business with the new Jolla Phone. Unlike the C2, this device is completely assembled in Salo, Finland, where Nokia phones were manufactured more than a decade ago.
“Europeans want more European technology,” Sami Pienimäki, CEO of Jolla Mobile, tells WIRED. “People want to go away from Big Tech, and the other trend is that European people want sovereign tech—it makes it possible for our kind of company to have a position in the market.”
Building a smartphone from scratch was also much harder over a decade ago, but today, Pienimäki says the operation can be fairly lean without having to “pay too much up-front.”
The components are sourced from various vendors and countries. The MediaTek Dimensity 7100 5G chip hails from Taiwan; the 50-megapixel main and 13-megapixel ultrawide camera sensors are from Sony; the 8 or 12 GB of RAM is from SK Hynix in South Korea.
“There are Chinese components as well—we are totally open about it—but the key is that, as we compile the software ourselves and install it in Finland, we protect the integrity of the product,” Pienimäki says.
What makes Sailfish OS unique over competitors like GrapheneOS and e/OS is that it’s not based on the Android Open Source Project, but Linux. That means it has no ties to Google—no need for the company to “deGoogle” the software; meaning there’s a greater sense of sovereignty over the software (and now the hardware). Still, it’s able to run Android apps, though the implementation isn’t perfect. Another common criticism is that it’s not as secure as options like GrapheneOS, where every app is sandboxed.
There’s a good chance some Android apps on Sailfish OS will run into issues, which is why in the startup wizard the phone will ask if you want to install services like MicroG—open source software that can run Google services on devices that don’t have the Google Play Store, making it an easier on-ramp for folks coming from traditional smartphones without a technical background. You don’t even need to create a Sailfish OS account to use the Jolla Phone.
Jolla’s effort is hardly the first to push the anti–Big Tech narrative. A wave of other hardware and software companies offer a deGoogled experience, whether that’s Murena from France and its e/OS privacy-friendly operating system or the Canadian GrapheneOS, which just announced a partnership with Motorola. At CES earlier this year, the Swiss company Punkt also teamed up with ApostrophyOS to deploy its software on the new MC03 smartphone. Jolla is following a broader European trend of reducing reliance on US companies, like how French officials ditched Zoom for French-made video conference software earlier this year.
Murena CEO and founder Gaël Duval wrote in a statement emailed to WIRED that the company believes it has a different mission from the Jolla Phone as it’s trying to bring the existing mobile app ecosystem—minus the permanent data collection by Google and third-party trackers—without a learning curve for the average person. “We want to make privacy possible for the everyday person without the need for technical expertise or a development background,” he says.
The Phone
A common problem with these niche smartphones is that they inevitably end up costing a lot of money for the specs. Take the Light Phone III, for example, a fairly low-tech anti-smartphone that doesn’t enjoy the benefits of economies of scale, resulting in an outlandish $699 price. The Jolla Phone is in a similar boat, though the specs-to-value ratio is a little more respectable.
It’s powered by a midrange MediaTek Dimensity 7100 5G chip with 8 GB of RAM, 256 GB of storage, plus a microSD card slot and dual-SIM tray. There’s a 6.36-inch 1080p AMOLED screen, the two main cameras, and a 32-megapixel selfie shooter. The 5,500-mAh battery cell is fairly large considering the phone’s size, though the phone’s connectivity is a little dated, stuck with Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.4.
Uniquely, the Jolla Phone brings back “The Other Half” functional rear covers from the original. These swappable back covers have pogo pins that interface with the phone, allowing people to create unique accessories like a second display on the back of the phone or even a keyboard attachment. There’s an Innovation Program where the community can cocreate functional covers together and 3D-print them. And yes, a removable rear cover means the Jolla Phone’s battery is user-replaceable.
Pienimäki says that while the device doesn’t have FCC approval, you can theoretically import it into the US, and it should work with the major US carriers, though compatibility is rarely a given. Jolla is considering a separate US launch, though right now it’s focusing on the European Union, the UK, Norway, and Switzerland.
Antti Saarnio, Jolla Group’s chairperson, reiterates that the Jolla Phone will be a niche product. “Most of the people using Android or iOS will not switch, but we should treat this as a stepping stone for something new,” Saarnio says. The “path to real volume” will come from the mobile market breaking down into new form factors, powered by artificial intelligence.
He’s likely referring to Jolla’s Mind2, a privacy-focused AI computer, which is still in active development. It plugs into a PC and connects Jolla’s AI assistant to apps like email and calendar locally—no cloud access required. The chatbot-like interface lets you ask it questions about your data, whether you’re fishing for something from an email or a private message. While the new Jolla Phone won’t have any AI capabilities at launch, Saarnio says an integration will be an option users can enable later this year.
Jolla has street cred for supporting its devices for a long time, but we’ll have to wait and see how the fresh hardware holds up and just how much the company has polished the Sailfish OS experience, especially since it’s much easier today to get started with a deGoogled Android alternative.
By those metrics my Fairphone 4 is also a European phone, right? PostmarketOS isn’t really up to snuff, but Ubuntu Touch works quite nicely on it.
Are they still closed source? If so, fuck em. This is only appealing to the Make Europe Great Again cucks who are willing to lock themselves into yet another walled garden just so they can claim “sovereignty”
The past two decades have proven that FOSS is the only way to obtain privacy and security. No borders necessary.
I think most of the OS is open source and has some closed source components (I think some drivers? Not sure tho)
Same thoughts. I want EU alternatives, but they must be opensource. Going from closed source to closed source is not an option, no matter where it comes from.
I would love to have one, but iam “stuck” with my fairphone 5 for the foreseeable future (8 years to go)
I am a bit hyped for it, especially the other half
I kinda want one, and my main phone is an iPhone. (I also have an Android phone, but it’s 5 years older.)
They say it’s based on Linux, not Android, but I’ve heard the reverse. That it’s just another Android fork that is made without Google. I hope this article is the accurate one, or that I misread before.
The problem is, I have a great phone now, and I have a good phone I’m not adverse to using, so I have no need for a new phone. But after paying down some cards and getting some other shit paid off, I’d like to buy another new phone in a few years, and I’d like to replace the Android phone rather than the iPhone, since the iPhone will be “good enough” for about a decade.
SFOS is not an Android fork. As many classical Linux distros, it controls sessions through systemd, the compositor is Wayland and the standard c lib is glibc. However, compatibility with the drivers of many hardware vendors and certainly also running binaries build for Android require Android libraries and abstraction layers to be present. Sadly some Android libraries or suitable replacements where available are absolutely necessary to run a phone nowadays. Both hardware and software producers are so focused on Android that drivers / binaries for alternative systems are not offered. That also underlines that this is indeed a niche product. Disclaimer: I ordered one of the phones.
People who understand Linux know, people who don’t, don’t care.
That is to say, yes you’re right and I understand why, but to most people, if it runs Android apps, it’s Android. Like GrapheneOS is “Android without Google.”
So, to explain, or at least qualify myself as someone who knows (as opposed to someone who doesn’t care, so you don’t think I’m blowing off what you said), Linux isn’t an OS, it’s a kernel, and Android uses the/a Linux kernel (I’m not sure if they use the most up to date one — macOS is certified UNIX, but it’s UNIX 3 which is a very old standard and it’s only barely that, so in practice it really isn’t UNIX except they can say it is). So these things we collectively call “Linux” (SteamOS, Ubuntu, Mint, Arch, etc.) are distros, which the lay person just thinks of as “flavours of Linux,” but in fact, Linux is the kernel, GNOME or KDE is the desktop environment, you have all these other packages, and all of it, together, working as a somewhat cohesive OS, is a “Linux distro” (i.e. the Linux kernel distributed with stuff to make an OS).
I used to say Android was Linux. That’s… not entirely accurate, but like saying macOS is UNIX, there’s some truth in there. Android basically exists because Steve Jobs said the iPhone would run OS X (what macOS was called then), and Andy Rubin said “shit, if Apple can put UNIX on a phone, I can probably port Linux to one as well.” And he did. And it wasn’t going to go anywhere because he had no real plan to monetise it. And then Google said, “shit, we can take that and scrape way more user data to sell than we could with Gmail alone.” Then Google threw a ton of money at Apple to become the default search on iPhones so they could get that data, too. And most iPhones leave the setting alone. (Mine uses DuckDuckGo. Fuck Google.) A lot of iPhone users also use Chrome, so Google gets the web history as well. Most iPhone users, and smartphone users in general, don’t care about privacy. I do, but not as much as some others.
and Andy Rubin said “shit, if Apple can put UNIX on a phone, I can probably port Linux to one as well.”
Hmm, wasn’t Rubin trying to put it on a digital camera though initially? Then Google saw the opportunity, bought them, and pivoted to phones.
If you are referring to libhybris, that’s only true for Android phones with SFOS backported, such as the Sony Xperias. The Jolla Phone will be pure Linux, with required Linux packages provided by Mediatek. Source: I’ve asked the Jolla folks at the Mobile World Congress booth.
Why is it ‘European’?
Made from non-european parts
It’s assembled in Finland though.
Yeah… Thats why its “European.” As in, almost European.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not criticizing them. The phone would cost 17390€ if it was made from European parts. Kind of have to do it this way.
Are there even any European chipmakers? I guess there are, but never really looked into it.
A whole bunch. But I think the issue with Jolla is that they are using “off the shelf” parts. If they bought European stuff, they’d have to design them and have the production stuff designed and done as well.
