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Comment by TheAceOfHearts | Hacker News Reader

Many years ago I backed the Jolla Tablet, which never shipped and they never gave me a refund. At the time the company kept pretending like things were perfectly fine with every update right until they let everyone know that the project was being cancelled. There was zero transparency and accountability, and from that day I vowed to never support this company ever again. I would've been fine if the project had failed and they had been transparent and honest about their ongoing struggles with every update, but the complete lack of transparency was too much for me.

I don't know if the values and leadership at Jolla have changed since then, but it's not a company that I would trust to deliver and communicate honestly in good faith.

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Not just the lack of transparency, they went bankrupt after the tablet fiasco (never refunded most of the people) and bought by some investment firm connections to the Russian state (not the thing you want from a privacy-friendly product / system) what they tried to keep secret.

AFAIK they have bought by some other company (again) since then, but they have basically nothing. Most of their Sailfish OS is actually closed source (like AOSP vs all the apps from Google), they don't have any hardware, they just re-flash some phone from Sony.

I had high hopes for them, but now wouldn't even touch them with a stick. Pixel with GrapheneOS seems to be a much better choice and maybe even closer to their original ideologies.

And yet Sailfish is a mature mobile OS, sufficient in many cases to be a daily driver, and an essential EU-based alternative to the Apple/Google monopoly. So there's that...

On a more superficial front, the UI is far ahead of both iOS and Android. Complaining about it being closed-source misses the point: the platform is Linux, and other than the proprietary front-end, everything else in Sailfish is wide open to hacking and independent development. So there's that too...

I'm not familiar with the background here.

There was a blog post committing to refunds given sufficient cashflow, posted in 2017:

<https://blog.jolla.com/summer-2017-ceo-update/>

HN discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14637748>

It does appear that Jolla has shipped other products (SailfishOS, the Jolla Phone in 2013, some tablets, and others, see Wikipedia: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolla#Sailfish_OS_products>).

Since 2017 the company has gone through bankruptcy and re-launched.

It should be remembered that kickstarter / crowdfunded ventures, as with any other, are speculative and risky. A good-faith effort to deliver on spec is itself credible, and the landscape is littered with the husks of far more failures, especially in the mobile space, including from former (and current) giants: RIM, Palm, Microsoft, Mozilla, Canonical, off the top of my head). Google and Apple are the only present significant OS options standing, Apple (again) and Samsung dominate hardware, though there's increasing competition largely from China.

I can't recall how many tablets were shipped, but I was lucky enough to get mine.

I never got a refund or a tablet. They were very unprofessional through the entire situation.

FWIW, I actually received my Jolla Tablet (albeit delayed). Your are right that Jolla is sometimes less transparent and professional than one would expect. However, I realize that Jolla is also under much more scrutiny by the community than other tech companies, and some people demand ridiculous levels of transparency/quality/features.

I don't think that expecting to get the product you pay for (even if it's just crowdfunding) is too much? Or putting them under too much scrutiny? I don't think people expect less from any other tech company? It's just really basic stuff.

They still continue to be hypocritical. They claim full commitment to free software, but their entire internal infrastructure is built entirely on proprietary solutions. Every time they invite their community to do something, such as join a Zoom meeting, the community is very surprised by the offer, but Jolla employees sincerely do not understand this reaction.

I don't mean be rude, but outside the SV bubble, funding is extremely hard and when companies are on the brink "ethics" becomes a luxury you can't really afford.

That's not an argument for not complaining against what was done, but given what they're doing - fighting two Goliaths that have 10000x the resources, I just wish people would give them another chance.

https://blog.jolla.com/jolla-tablet-closure/

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