Welcome news coming out of Jolla, the company that develops Sailfish OS. Up until now, if you bought their Jolla C2 smartphone, you had to pay a yearly subscription fee in order to get updates (with the first year included in the purchase price). Today they’ve announced their dropping this construction, and they now guarantee five years of free updates.
We’re happy to announce that from now onwards long-term Sailfish OS updates are included free-of-charge to all Jolla C2 devices for a minimum of 5 years. This applies also to everybody who have already purchased the Jolla C2.
↫ Announcement at the Jolla forums
People don’t like subscriptions, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Jolla was simply running into a lot of resistance to this subscription model from potential customers. Nobody likes subscriptions, and I think that counts doubly so for the kinds of people interested in buying a phone like the C2 with Sailfish OS.
I appreciate they’ve now clawed it back, but the whole project lost my support when they sold out to russia. The fairly small annual cost didn’t really bother me.
I probably have my sony phone in storage somewhere, but not inclined to dig it out.
@thom you were an early adaptor, is it viable to use these days?
AFAIR they bought it back from Russin after the backlash so there is no reliance.
For me – lack of support for more devices (and weird UI that I couldn’t get into) made the whole project meh…
I use Sailfish OS as my main phone and although there are inevitably some compromises, I rarely regret sticking with it over Android or iOS. Different people have different needs of course.
Isn’t this just them complying with new EU-regulations?
Jolla always struck me as a company with decent people working there, so maybe initially it was just a way to ensure they had the money to actually develop said updates, turned out they had that money from the sales alone, so they killed the sub.
How far back are they supporting? Because I couldn’t understand why the dropped the first version? I supported them since they crowdfounded it. I got the phone, but never the tablet, so why should I trust them again?