In September, Finnish company Jolla announced official support for running Android apps on its Sailfish mobile OS. Now it is revealing that, as expected, these apps won’t be coming directly from Google Play Store but will instead be provided by Yandex.Store.
Jolla was formed by former Nokia employees who left the company after being disillusioned by the former Finnish giant’s new direction. Jolla is developing its own smartphone and its own mobile OS, which it calls Sailfish OS, loosely based on the Nokia N9 and the MeeGo, or Mer to be exact, mobile platform, two products abandoned by Nokia. Jolla wants to disrupt the European mobile market and so it is partnering with several regional giants to accomplish its rather ambitious goals.
While Google may be a household name in the US and other parts of the globe, in Russia, it faces strong competition from Internet company Yandex. Among other services, such as search and e-mail, Yandex also has its own Android market store. Via a partnership with another company, Jolla is providing support for natively running Android apps on its upcoming smartphone. However, the device naturally cannot be certified to run Google Play services, and hence, no Google Play Store will be available by default. It will now be relying on Yandex.Store to deliver 85,000 Android apps to device, which should ensure that there will not be a dearth of apps on the device, even if native Sailfish OS apps don’t cut it.
It is interesting to note that Jolla has not completely shunned any relationship with Nokia. Instead of Google Maps, its smartphones will instead be using GPS services and map technologies from HERE, which is one of the very few businesses Nokia will be left with once the sale of its mobile business to Microsoft pushes through.
SOURCE: Jolla (PDF)
