On paper, the reason for installing Aurora on the tablets is for carrying out Russia’s population consensus in 2020. A Huawei spokesperson confirmed that the company is currently holding talks with the Russian Ministry of Communications. Two sources at Reuters specified, “Huawei is interested in the project. It showed samples of tablets that could be used,” and, “This is a pilot project. We see it as the first stage of launching the Russian OS on Huawei devices.”
Aurora is a Russia-specific version of Sailfish OS.
Sailfish is real. Localization in the Russian language is real.
But, I guess what I’m saying if Russian forums, which have posts not even numbering in the dozens, talk about an OS that nobody can download, not even in Russia – it’s hardly got a big swell of support.
Sure, it makes for political drama.
A few dedicated huawei engineers could easily port it to their devices. It has an android runtime so could be a decent 3rd option for huawei if the android proper deal goes south.
rollyd,
Normally I’d say the market won’t support a 3rd mobile platform. We’ve got a duopoly with nearly 100% of the market, and then everybody else. However these are very interesting circumstances.with the whitehouse interfering with capitalistic markets.
I’ve used the game of monopoly as a metaphor for capitalism in explaining how & why markets become more and more consolidated over time with competition becoming non-viable. Well the whitehouse ban adds a new quirk and bans google from owning some important tiles.
One of the reasons android is so popular is that it is the least friction option into the market for manufacturers. Android was not technically better than competing platforms, but it is good enough, free to license, and few can dispute google’s huge market advantages. Now when you throw in the whitehouse prohibition for US companies to partner with one of the most prominent chinese manufacturers, this action creates a new market opening for a 3rd option. While the reasons behind it are certainly contrived, suddenly android is no longer good enough and a platform change is being forced. It’s kind of ironic, but the whitehouse interfering with google’s ability to maximize it’s marketshare in china and abroad is probably the best chance a 3rd party platform has to dig into google’s dominant market share.
Interesting times…
Well, Sailfish is barely real… I was really interested in it at one time. I tried to buy the Jolla tablet but they didn’t build it. I wanted the Jolla C phone but they wouldn’t sell it to me let alone give me any credit for it from the non-existent tablet. You can BUY Sailfish for a whole three supported devices (Cool I guess?) BUT not if you are in the US.
It’s just Sailfish without the Android emulation layer — there’s nothing special about buying a license for an OS that’s already localized into two dozen languages including Russian.
Uh, Sailfish works fine on my Nexus 4, and I didn’t need to purchase it.
I was able to purchase a copy of Sailfish X by using a tool like Psiphon to fool the Jolla servers into thinking I was in the UK. I had to download the image through there, though, which was painfully slow. But I’m not sure why they aren’t making it directly available.
360,000 devices? That’s barely 1/3 of a million. Against 2+ billion Android devices (running Linux in their heart-beats), Sailfish is barely a drop in the ocean.