In April this year, we managed to check out a demonstration of the Sailfish mobile operating system, spending some hands-on time with it, while a month later, the folks over at Jolla did announce their first Sailfish OS powered smartphone. Just a little bit of context before we continue, Sailfish OS happens to be a Linux-based mobile operating system which is the “spiritual successor” of the abandoned MeeGo project, and to make things more approachable and of course, to stoke the interest of end users, it is now official that the Sailfish OS is full well capable of supporting Android apps. Even better yet, these apps do not need to be modified in order to run on a Sailfish platform.
According to Jolla, Sailfish OS users are free to download Android apps from “various app stores.” It remains to be seen, however, if you are able to take advantage of the Google Play Store, Amazon Appstore, or other existing app stores for Android. Apart from support for Android apps, Sailfish also features support for the hardware that can be found in common Android smartphones and tablets. This ought to make life easy for custom ROM builders to port Sailfish over to the Android platform.
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