In an effort to boost its independence from Western technology, Russia has announced that it will be creating its own mobile operating system, the Russian-language news site RBC reports (English language summary). Russia's Ministry of Communications is working with the Finnish company Jolla, which already offers a Linux-based operating system for mobile devices called Sailfish.

The move to create a national mobile operating system forms part of a larger plan to reduce Russian reliance on foreign technology, announced last month. The Minister of Communications and Mass Media, Nikolai Nikiforov, is quoted by RBC as saying that he hopes to reduce the market share of foreign mobile operating systems from the current 95% to 50% by 2025. Although the official line is that this is to protect the personal data of Russians, the main impetus for the move is doubtless revelations from Edward Snowden that many Western products contain backdoors used by US and UK intelligence agencies to conduct surveillance on a large scale.

The strategic aspect of the move is confirmed by Nikiforov's proposal for an international consortium to collaborate on the project, to include IT companies from Russia, Brazil, India, China, and South Africa—the so-called "BRICS" countries, which are increasingly asserting their economic and technological independence from the West. Gaining support from China and India would create a potential market of several billion users, transforming the prospects for the new operating system. Moreover, once mobile phones were in production, Russia and China might bring in protectionist measures making it much harder for Western companies to operate in their territories, as those countries have already done in the online sphere.

The choice of Jolla makes sense from a number of viewpoints. The company was formed by a group of engineers working on the earlier MeeGo operating system, who left Nokia at a time when the Finnish telecommunications giant was losing market share in the mobile sector. MeeGo was itself an attempt to merge two earlier mobile operating systems, Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo, both Linux-based. Jolla's Sailfish, and the as-yet-unnamed Russian operating system, can therefore draw on many years of development and experience. However, the RBC article quotes an unnamed source as saying that the Russian Ministry of Communications wants to make a new product, rather than simply adopting Sailfish, so it's not clear how much additional work will need to be done.

In addition, Jolla already has significant investment from both Russian and Chinese companies, which should make working with governments in those countries much easier, and assuage concerns that Jolla might try to add in its own backdoors. In any case, one of the big advantages of using the open-source Linux as the foundation of the mobile operating system is that its source code can be checked at any point.

This isn't the first time that a BRICS country has tried to introduce a home-grown mobile operating system. Last year, China unveiled its China Operating System (COS), which was specifically designed to address security concerns with Western products, and was created in the hope that it would become the main operating system of China. However, little has been heard of it since. That contrasts with the huge success of new Chinese mobile phone companies like Xiaomi, which sold 2.11 million phones in a single day earlier this year, all running a variant of Android. That suggests the new Russian government-backed project faces an uphill task in displacing popular commercial systems running Android and iPhone.