MeeGo to get an app store

Recently, in an interview with Tietekone magazine, Managing Director of Jolla mobile Jussi Hurmola announced that MeeGo would be getting a software store where users can get apps for their Meego devices.

Hurmola said that it is clear that Jolla’s next phone needs an ecosystem for third party apps. “We have now published our Qt/QML story but this is not enough. We are all the time building our ecosystem and we will also create a software store where consumers can buy applications for their phone.”

“When the smart phone hits the market, it must absolutely have large number of applications available.” Hurmola also said, “When we will publish the phone, we will also tell more about the availability of applications.”

App Market incoming!

Nokia and Meego had parted ways earlier this month. A group of former Nokia employees along with enthusiasts of the MeeGo OS had then announced that they had started a new company, Jolla, with the primary goal of bringing a MeeGo-powered smartphone to the market.

Jolla is Finnish for rescue sail boat or dinghy, and is a reference to what they aim to bring to the table when they launch their MeeGo-based smartphone. Jolla is being led by Chief Operating Officer Marc Dillon and in a statement he had said, “Jolla Ltd. is a Finland based smartphone company which continues the great work that Nokia started with MeeGo. The Jolla team is formed by directors and core professionals from Nokia's MeeGo N9 organization, together with some of the best minds working on MeeGo in the communities.” He had gone on to add, “Nokia created something wonderful - the world's best smartphone product. It deserves to be continued, and we will do that together with all the bright and gifted people contributing to the MeeGo success story.”

The open source community was very excited when MeeGo was first announced in February 2010 by Intel and Nokia in a joint press conference. According to Intel, MeeGo was developed because Microsoft did not offer comprehensive Windows 7 support for the Atom processor. The MeeGo core operating system is a Linux distribution based on Intel’s Fedora-based Moblin and Nokia’s Debian-based Maemo. Though adored by a niche audience, MeeGo never saw much mainstream success, especially here in India where Nokia didn’t launch the N900.

The last phone to come out of Nokia's factories to run on MeeGo was the N9. After the release of the Windows Phone line-up, Nokia has backed off from efforts to revitalize MeeGo, focussing most of its resources instead on its new partnership with Microsoft.