The quest for freedom from US technologies and patent fees has been a persistent theme in China and has helped shape the new mobile landscape, in which Baidu and Alibaba, not Google and Amazon, dominate the user experience. Less is heard about another massive market, Russia, but here too, the push for technology self-sufficiency is gathering momentum, creating opportunities for alternatives to Android and iOS.

The Russian government has chosen Sailfish – a Finnish Linux-based mobile operating system created by start-up Jolla – as the basis of its own mobile software platform, which will be developed by new venture Open Mobile Platform (OMP) and will be adopted by government agencies and state-owned corporations.

Russia chooses Jolla over homegrown effort

Russia’s Ministry of Communications assessed various alternatives, according to local reports, and in particular, chose Sailfish over Tizen OS for its greater openness and security. Jolla chairman Antti Saarnio told TechCrunch that the selection process had started back in spring 2015. He added: “It started with the IT Ministry of Russia long-listing available alternative mobile operating systems. They ended up doing a technical analysis of two OSs: one was Tizen, the other was us, Sailfish OS.”

He explained: “After a couple of months very thorough technical evaluation they selected our OS for further collaboration. What we then started was a joint R&D project with a local Russian organization to build an OS version of Sailfish into Russia so that government will have an independent OS but it’s supported by our overall code base. The Russian government has a list of software which can be seen as a national software and which are audited and certified, and in this list of software, our software is the only mobile OS software — currently.”

It seems that there were no credible Russian-developed alternatives to Android, though Jolla is working with Open Mobile to integrate Sailfish code with a Russian services platform.