Chinese Huawei, which has lost access to updates to the Android operating system due to American bans, can be helped by Rostelecom and Russian businessman Grigory Berezkin, who own the developer of the Russian mobile OS Aurora, The Bell reported. https://thebell.io

Before the St. Petersburg Forum, Huawei’s chief executive officer Guo Ping discussed the possible transition of Chinese smartphones to Sailfish with the minister of digital development and communications, Konstantin Noskov. This topic was raised at the meetings of the Russian President Vladimir Putin with the Chinese leader Jinping.

According to the federal official, the talks are going in two directions.

The first direction is the installation of the Aurora operating system (the Russian version of the Finnish Sailfish) on various types of devices of the Chinese company. It can be installed on Huawei devices instead of Google’s Android system, which a Chinese company cannot fully use after US bans.

 "China is already testing devices with the Aurora pre-installed," said insider.

The second direction is the localization of production in Russia of part of Huawei devices -the possible deployment of a joint production of chips and software.

Since 2012, the Sailfish operating system has been developed by the Finnish company Jolla, created by people from Nokia. In 2014, the Russian billionaire Grigory Berezkin, who agreed with the Ministry of Communications on the creation of a Russian national mobile OS based on Sailfish, became a co-owner of Jolla through its UST group. Since 2016, the Open Mobile Platform company associated with Berezkin has been developing the Russian version of the system.