Jolla hopes to gain market share by letting Android device owners install Sailfish

Jolla, a company made up of ex-Nokia employees that were disappointed when the MeeGo project was killed, released its first flagship phone running Sailfish OS earlier this week.

Now, the company says it has big plans to attack the smartphone market head on by making Sailfish available for installation on existing Android devices to help it open up the platform to a wider audience rather than restricting it only to first party hardware.

In an interview with Finnish website, Talouselämä, Jolla CEO Tomi Pienimäki said that Jolla is a “device business and OS business. It is fairly easy to install the OS on Android devices.”

It’s obvious that the company is well aware of the Android ROM community and its power to help the platform spread, with Pienimäki pointing out that “half of smartphone buyers [in China] are upgrading their older or cheaper devices with a better version of Android” and that the company believes that the community can help Sailfish OS thrive on Android hardware.

Jolla also realizes that it won’t get any money through distribution and that the company will need to add value on top of the OS, with Pienimäki continuing that applications, services and advertising are all on the table.

There’s no information about when the company might introduce a way to install the OS onto Android devices, but there’s a real possibility that if Jolla were make to make Sailfish simple to install, it could quickly gain significant market share.