yes it can. Official Saifish devices include an Android runtime called AppSupport. But be aware that not all apps will work. Especially banking apps can cause problems, because they frequently require google play services integrity. It's basically the anti cheat thing from Linux gaming all over again.
Vittelius
They've added a signup form for people not in Europe at the bottom of the page. (Pretty sure it's new, maybe I just missed it before) You can use it to register your interest.
In February 2022 Jolla announced that it has discontinued its business in Russia during 2021 and is seeking a shareholder structure without Russian ownership.
In November 2023 Jolla announced that Pirkanmaa District Court had approved a corporate restructuring plan which would see Jolla's business and staff acquired by a new company owned by the Jolla management team.
SailfishOS has been around since 2013. It's based on an even older Nokia project (from before they got bought and sold by Microsoft). Since then there has been a number of devices running it. In recent years that's mostly been the Jolla C2, a rebranded low spec device by Turkish manufacturer Reeder, and certain Sony phones, such as the Xperia V III. The latter doesn't ship with SFOS but you can purchase a €50 license and install it yourself.
There are also community ports that are unofficial and don't have all the features (Android app support is missing for example) but run on some other devices. The problem in ARM world is that OS's need to be tailored to the device (for the most part). It's not like on intel or amd PCs. So if you want to run it on your Samsung or whatever, then you can do that. It's just a lot of work.
It's somewhere inbetween. For the most part you have a standard Linux userland. The packaging format for example is just RPM. But the shells compositor can currently only properly display Android and qt apps. There has been some discussion at the last community meeting (where the devs answer questions) about improved Wayland support to change that, but that's where we are.
Furtermore, for drivers and the like some Android blobs are used. There are therefore some Sailfish specific apis that you need to target for some of the functionality.
It's not mentioned on the store page, but according to the accompanying form thread, the whole thing is based on a unspecified but "powerful" MediaTek SOC
I'm not from Australia and I knew that. But you are probably right, I've edited my post.
As have Spain and the Netherlands
You'll also probably want to bookmark this: https://docs.chrultrabook.com/docs/installing/post-install.html#general-qol-fixes
The Chrultrabook project makes the distro run a bit smoother once it's installed by providing fixes for the audio stack and custom keyboard layouts to make the top row of keys work properly among other things
https://docs.mrchromebox.tech/ provides custom coreboot firmware for a variety of ChromeOS devices. Once you've flashed it on your Chromebook, you should be able to just install Linux on it
His floats can be seen every Rose Monday at the carnival parade in Düsseldorf. The parade is also broadcast the same day on the tv channel WDR