Russian mobile OS to be developed by Grigory Berezkin's company / M. Stulov / Vedomosti

Minister of Communications Nikolai Nikiforov announced on his Twitter account the opening of the Russian Mobile Operating System Development Center in Innopolis, Tatarstan.

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The development will be carried out by the company "Open Mobile Platform", follows from the minister's statement. According to SPARK-Interfax, such a company was indeed recently registered in Tatarstan and is owned by the company "Votron", which, in turn, is 80% owned by Grigory Berezkin, and the remaining 20% by Mikhail Verozub. SPARK-Interfax names the former head of the Russian office of the antivirus manufacturer McAfee Pavel Eiges as the general director of the company.

And in Moscow, a company with a similar name, “Open Mobile Platform-CR,” was registered, the CEO of which is also Pavel Eiges, and is owned by Olga Berezkina and Vladimir Verozub (80% and 20%, respectively).

In his message, the Minister of Communications specified that it would be a "global mobile OS, a significant part of the code of which will be written in Russia." The company itself states that it is developing an operating system for portable devices based on Linux. And its main task is to compete with the Android operating system in the budget mobile device market.

About a year ago it became known that the founder of the ESN group Grigory Berezkin became the owner of the Finnish company Jolla, created by people from Nokia. This company develops its own smartphones and tablets based on the Sailfish operating system. According to data as of April 8, 2015, 9.72% of Sailfish Holding belongs to the Moscow-registered company Votron Ltd., 80% of which, according to the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, was owned by Berezkin.

Last year, the Ministry of Communications pinned its hopes on this Finnish company to develop a national mobile OS. In early June 2015, Jolla won the Ministry's competition for import substitution of operating systems for mobile devices. In addition to the Finnish company, the consortium of developers included ESN, the software company ESK, and Yandex. According to the software import substitution plan approved by the Ministry of Communications on April 1, 2015, the share of imported client and mobile operating systems on the Russian market should decrease from the current 95% to 75% by 2020 and to 50% by 2025. The cost of developing an OS based on Sailfish was estimated at 2.225 billion rubles, of which 1.89 billion rubles were to be financed from the budget. However, since then, the Ministry of Communications has not announced the allocation of funds for this project.

At the time of publication of the article, Grigory Berezkin had not responded to Vedomosti’s request, and the representative of the Ministry of Communications, Ekaterina Osadchaya, did not answer the call of the Vedomosti correspondent.