Comment by rzerowan
4 hours ago
Seems they still havent figured out a business model for their OS. Hardware at low volumes wont move ala kickstarter.
Would have thought after their ups and downs they would have landedon a sustainable businesss model. The market oppurtunity is there and the timing is favourable. All thats needed to stick the landing and have a viable alt to the ios/android duoploly.
Personally would recommend they work with an established OEM to customize/port drivers to existing hardware and market to a specific vertical rather than a general purpose for normies device.
They have been selling Sailfish X for selected Sony Xperia devices for years.
Thats part of it actually , they have(had) a nonstandard offering via Sony hardware. If it was a known OEM like Oppo/Honor/Oneplus theres already some familiarity/buyin from users and lines possibly can be opened for select verticals.
Instead with the SonyX offerings , they linited it to a tiny range, upgrades as i recall were sometimes not possible to newer versions and a separate support contract to Jollla was needed.
A pure play ala android would do better, they (jolla) do the software - the OEM does the hardware/updates similarly to how Linux distros like Ubuntu get bundled into Dell etc.
If they were a hardware firm like Huawei bulding their phone and OS makes sense , or with massive scale like Google with Pixel.They are neither. Hardware is hard, and scaling it at volume moreso.