[3] In 2024, to escape Russia's investors due to the Ukrainian war, the Jolla initial company filed for bankruptcy, continuing its activity under the JollyBoys name.

The same year, Nokia announced that the N8 would be the last flagship phone to run Symbian, and "Going forward, N-series devices will be based on MeeGo".

As a result, in October 2011, some of the MeeGo team left Nokia to form the project called Jolla, aimed at developing new opportunities with the GNU MeeGo OS, using funding from Nokia's "Bridge" program which helps establish and support start-up companies by ex-Nokia employees.

Jolla's Sailfish OS, which used middleware core stack of Mer, is a direct successor to MeeGo and the Jolla is successor of N9, but used only the open-sourced components of MeeGo, while the closed-source user interface design (of codename Harmattan) for all future devices had to be developed from scratch.

On 6 July 2012, Jolla publicly announced its intention to develop new smartphones that used a gesture-oriented swipe interface corresponding to former Nokia's Harmattan UI experience.

They named their operating system "Sailfish OS", which includes a gesture-based user interface developed using Qt, QML and HTML5, as did Nokia's N9.

[13] In November 2015, Jolla had to lay off half of its employees due to financial problems caused by delayed financing from an investor.

[23] In February 2022 Jolla announced that it has discontinued its business in Russia during 2021 and is seeking a shareholder structure without Russian ownership.

Sailfish OS has an open core that can be improved by the community but also a proprietary UI that is seen as the succession of the Nokia N9 interface.

Basic UI applications, like mail, contacts, camera are provided by Jolla and are under continuous development.

Sailfish OS 2 was implemented in November 2015 for the Jolla Tablet and made compatible for all other products onward.

[35][36] AppSupport uses a Linux Container (LXC) to run an Android-like environment within an embedded Linux system, synchronizing contacts and launchers and bridging notifications, media controls and libraries, cameras and networks with the host system, resulting in a highly integrated app environment.