Jolla Phone (October 2026)

"It acquired new investors in 2016, among them the Russian company Votron. In March 2018 they were joined by Rostelecom (which is state owned) as investor, which took over Votron and OMP."

Note that was after 2014 russian invasion into Ukraine.

I don't think that is true. Team members regularly speak positively of iPhone security. E.g.:

https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/113874795519341571

They also do not post much on LineageOS and when they do it usually articulates the difference between both (with LineageOS focusing more on customizability, while being much less secure).

I think the strongest disagreement is with /e/OS, which is not surprising, because their founder goes around to various widely-viewed/read media insinuating that security hardening/GrapheneOS is only for pedophiles and spies.

They seem to be borderline impossible to work with, very arrogant and protectionist,

As a user, they seem to be responsive to bug reports and actively helping out people in their forums. Not sure what else I need.

and the project's own support lifetime is "when Google no longer supports your phone, we don't either."

But that makes sense, right? One of the main foci of GrapheneOS is security. If Google stops supporting a Pixel model, there will be no more updates of firmware bundles, etc. Most firmware has monthly CVEs, pretending that it doesn't would go counter one of the main goals of GrapheneOS. If you want to maintain such a phone as an insecure device after Google's update period, there are other options you could switch to.

I am also not sure how much this matters. Even Pixel budget devices (a-series) have 7 years of security updates now. It's not only one of the longest in the industry, it's probably beyond how long 95% of the population uses a phone.

If you are worried about big players profiling you (hard to avoid, high likelihood of happening, low likelihood of damage), then you want Sailfish.

If you are worried about apps profiling you (easy to avoid, high likelihood of happening, moderate likelihood of damage), you want Android or iOS.

Graphene and Sailfish sit on different points on that spectrum, just like OpenBSD and Linux do.

Everything I listed was an advantage. Now see, I don't think Unix is the be-all end-all of operating systems design. I don't particularly care for Linux, the BSDs, macOS, etc. But Android is a definite regression in the strongest terms. Give me a PIMOS or Genera or Squeak phone that works well. I'll be happier than I would with a Linux phone.

If you say, rely on google maps, banking apps, apps for your IoT appliances, etc. it's certainly relevant. I don't have any of that though.

For me the most and truest pressing issue is that cell modems are very, very tightly coupled with Android. It's still true for the Jolla Phone that it simply is a worse phone because the modem drivers are buggy. This is a complicated issue that isn't getting better, and is mostly to do with legislation legally mandating the tivoization of cell modems, a weird line in the sand on what responsibilities fall to the hardware or to what software, as well as the modem manufacturers themselves not really caring.

Is this an assumption or coming from your experience? Because I'm typing this on a GNU/Linux phone in a desktop browser and use a bunch of desktop applications daily and haven't noticed.

Of course if you run GIMP or something like that it won't fit unless you plug an external screen and a mouse in, but all the applications I use daily are perfectly usable. There's a lot of Kirigami and libadwaita programs these days that just work well on a phone, and if I need to launch my bank's application there's always Waydroid.

My phone would have a screen time of a few mins per day. I can't stand doing anything on these tiny touch screens or browsing the web on a phone screen.

Most people will fill that up in a glimpse without using cloud services

2) The point still stands, desktop operating systems like Windows and desktop Linux distributions are much less secure than Android or iOS. Read https://privsec.dev/posts/linux/linux-insecurities/

A true AOPS image is missing most core Apps.

The main point is that AOSP as a system (modulo firmware) is open source and SailfishOS is not. Also, even though Sailfish has an Android compatibility layer (though only for official devices), compatibility is most likely always going to be worse than 'real' Android.

That said, I hope that Jolla Phone becomes a success, more competition is good. Hopefully being funded better will move them to fully open source the base system.

If we're going to start counting forks, we get to count LineageOS and GrapheneOS for Android, and then the goalposts really move.

Russians hate the West and the incumbents know it. If Western companies started to muscle in again they would drop the price to protect their market shares.

Kind of silly to give up your entire market share over an unwinnable war.

reply to below: I had to add the rebuttal to your racist comment earlier (which you ironically deleted) by editing this comment, because I am being throttled and cannot reply to anymore comments.

I've seen "Packaged in $country" on boxes before, so I suspect they are two different things.

Like food made in Canada that shows up in American chain stores being labeled "Distributed by QFC." There's lots of rules about this sort of thing.

Reminds me of back in the late 90's when Wal-Mart was all rah-rah about "Made in the USA!" on all of its products. Then my company bought every employee a Sam's Club membership and the cards were all marked "Litho en Mexico."

Hiring people to put batteries in phones and phones in boxes? Never done that specifically, but other assembly line stuff like that does not require much. Certainly not a multi year culture building process. I used to work for a company that built food gift boxes. When we staffed up for the holiday season, it took about 20 minutes to train new hires. We once added an entire line in a day to make a custom product. I’m not saying that the managers and workers didn’t work hard, but it was not particularly complex work. Most of the difficulty was in finding ways to reduce packing times by a few percentage points.

Put this way: your company have a week to build one of the above processes for 1500 phones a week, and they get a $1mm bonus if they succeed. Do you choose pick and place assembly or battery assembly.