Submitted by “Jolla, the mobile startup staffed by former Nokia executives who want to keep the company’s MeeGo software alive, says it will use existing technology to bring in apps from other platforms – including Android. Will it be enough to boost the plucky company’s fortunes?” It won’t be a saving grace, but it’s a nice bonus. There’s something about these guys that fills me with confidence. Can’t wait for their devices to hit the market.
Just to clarify, Jolla aren’t going to release Meego hansets, they’ll make handsets with an OS based on Mer Core with their UI. Jolla use Meego name rather loosely, referring to the effort inherited from the Meego project, rather than to the Meego project itself which is managed by the Linux Foundation and is now basically halted.
Edited 2012-08-24 22:32 UTC
What’s the point in being able to use apps from different platforms? Will this not encourage developers to code native apps? I’m all for Mer and I’m all for Jolla, but if I can remember this was quite a few times (OS/2, Playbook, etc.) and it had the opposite effect of pulling in more devs/support.
I guess their point it to compensate for some applications which are still missing in the native form. Same as for example Wine is useful to run something that you can’t run natively. It doesn’t discourage creating more native applications, since ACL and etc. is not as good as native code, and it’s just a fallback when there are no other options.
Edited 2012-08-24 22:49 UTC
It clearly states on their website that all Android apps perform as native on the operating system with zero latencies.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, it will just primarily encourage further adoption (and focusing 3rd party dev efforts) of already the most widely adopted & well supported platform, one without such issues – in this case, ~default Android.
Overall, same and again like it was with Meego, fantasies. What Jolla OS ultimately ends up being, in practice – likely just another “radical” skin on top of Android (but lagging even more behind, because of its insistence on very non-standard core). And supposedly people hate those…
It may pull in fewer developers, but it may pull in more sales. And I’m less certain about the developers – on what other platform can you write “real” applications without compromises?
Build a good device, and I’m sold.
I see this going the OS/2 way
This article is wrong. Jolla has not confirmed any of these things betond that it runs Mer core with it’s own UX. Nothing has been said about ACL.