KaiOS – A Smartphone Operating System
kaiostech.com
kaiostech.com
The thing I like about this platform is that it runs most web technologies. You can thank Firefox OS for that. We used React ecosystem to develop apps for KaiOS and they worked well enough. Jio Phone ships with Video and Audio streaming apps which are all built on either React or Angular and use HTML5. I think all of that was possible on Firefox OS as well and they haven't really changed anything substantially. We were given links to archived FirefoxOS documentation pages when we asked for documentation.
They have managed to package FirefoxOS for enterprise customers. From what I know the KaiOS team comprises of people who worked on parts of Firefox OS (but not the core FirefoxOS team). This makes me wonder why FirefoxOS shut down and why did it not try to market itself like KaiOS has managed to do.
Speculating, but it's easy to see how Mozilla going after enterprise customers would have attracted a lot of bad press. FFOS was already carrying enough bad mojo, attaching "enterprise" to it would have been even worse.
For good or ill, Mozilla is supposed to be different from other corporations, at least in theory.
"KaiOS is a curated platform for apps and we are working closely with app developers to provide the best experience for our users. At the moment we are not accepting submissions into the Store, but will do so in the future."
* The foundation was bleeding money and had to limit it's focus
* The Matchstick on KickStarter made FireFox OS look like a non-viable product
* Not a lot of chimerical interest outside from outside the community
The firefox OS website tried to divide visitors into hardware vendors, consumers and app writers. Imagine the success of Linus's first announcement if he told people which lines they could stand in to appreciate Linux when he was done writing it..
Digging deeper than you appeared to be welcome would get you into setup tasks with AOSP.. There is no better way to lose help then to ask them to learn about a more complete competitor.
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/hardware/jiophone-...
To get some sense for the importance of this phone, this is the only feature phone you can get the Google Assistant on: https://www.androidauthority.com/google-assistant-coming-fea...
I find it hard to believe that manual entering of phone numbers is common use case. Nowadays people mainly communicate by texting/chatting via social networks, right?
I am however guessing that a smaller screen will lead to longer battery life and the phone seems to aim itself at markets where that matters more than in the west.
Web abstraction layer for UI is too heavy and very limited. Even today we can't have multithreaded scrolling or manage painting with the latest web standards.
Native platforms don't have to worry about "other browsers" so they can optimize their UI abstraction layer specific to their target devices. They also don't have to wait for ever to get consensus for new APIs and architectures firm multiple parties that don't specially care about your platform.
No wonder native apps are so much better for the user and with recent developments in tooling they are as easy to work with as th eweb technologies
The issue with web UIs in general is that it's still too hard to get optimal performance (eg. make sure you leverage the GPU as much as possible, don't force reflows, etc.). That could be solved by better tooling but we're not there yet.
But you do have to admit that UI latency on it was quite high compared to iOS. I mean, so was Android back then, but they improved it significantly.
There’s good reason to blelieve that given enough time and even a fraction of resources that the Android team had WebOS would be able to significantly up their performance game (I say a fraction of resources because there is a lot of well funded open source development being done to improve web tech on mobile, through Chromium, WebKit and Firefox that would be leveraged).
Just watch a few Google I/O tracks, and there is always the future of mobile apps is Android on the Android tracks, while the Chrome/Web tracks are pushing for the future of mobile apps is Web, with an occasional jab at native devs, as if on the room next door they weren't talking about native development.
Then to make it even better, now we have Flutter as the third track.
While PWAs are slowly being adopted by everyone else, Google is the company pushing them.
They even have a Web Site just for PWAs, https://developers.google.com/web/progressive-web-apps/, so yeah politics.
What isn't so understandable is having a speech as if on the next door employees of the same company weren't exactly speaking the opposite.
I don't understand how in stage A one can speak how glorious the future of native apps is going to be, while on Stage B we are hearing how web apps are going to win the war against native apps and PWA are the path to it.
This definitely isn't true. The web is very much alive and flourishing on mobile.
Using web technologies for _everything_ on the phone however, is a mistake. That is not good.
Just today I had to kill Chrome on my device for the WebGL demo that was posted earlier. Yet it does OpenGL 3.x just without sweating.
I agree that web apps are faster to iterate but the user experience is guaranteed to be worse.
I've worked on some of the web apps that are usually featured as "see web can do this". I'm not an outsider. I'm just observing how any app that is successful is either native already or they are making it native asap
At any rate, we have a number of well know brand flagship apps built on Ionic, though they might not have usage patterns like Facebook/Snapchat. By far the most mobile development happening right now is outside of the well known consumer social app space.
That is not the metric. Is fast-UI, not how many devs are lazy or don't know how do native.
I invest more than 2 months researching the space this year (after several other times before), and seriously, only iOS is fast enough for html/webview.
Android is SUPER slow. I mean, i get your ionic sample app and run it on my test device. I touch once... and wait a century (sarcasm) for it to respond..
Can I develop apps for KaiOS?
KaiOS is a curated platform for apps and we are working closely with app developers to provide the best experience for our users. At the moment we are not accepting submissions into the Store, but will do so in the future.
If you are interested in developing apps for KaiOS in the future, leave your email in our developers section. We will notify you when of important product updates. You can also follow us on Twitter to stay up to date.
I'm not sure if this is really a good way to get developers on board given the ease of starting and experimenting on iOS and Android.
As a user, I for example much prefer the harsh controls that Linux distributions have in place. If it's in the repository, you can essentially be sure that it does not do anything that's not probably actually in your interest, and just as well that it is actually decent software, somehow useful to someone. Probably the best software in its class, available on the platform, too.
Yeah, it also means that less is available on the platform. That maybe the highest quality software in a class is not always as high quality as in other distribution platforms, but for most jobs really, you don't need the non-plus-ultra, you need a tool that does the job and one of which you know that it does the job, without trying it out for hours or having to fight defaults that work against you.
On Android, F-Droid sort of provides that, but it's still just a small island of decency glued on top of a system and ecosystem that lives off of user-hostile behaviour. If as a user you don't know of F-Droid, you're hardly going to find these decent apps in that sea of not-so-decent apps, which really discourages the creation of decent apps as well.
With a curated platform, you could provide the user with trust in their platform (which might especially also be sellable to businesses) and you can keep the air free around those actually decent apps.
Today, Apple barely can do quality control on the iOS store, Google essentially doesn't bother, why should a small shop deal with the issue right off the bat?
>KaiOS is based on the Firefox OS open-source project and we are committed to abide by the rules of the applicable open source licenses. Therefore, we’ll make the source code available to the extent required by the applicable open source licenses.
Haha. Good luck with your OS. Next.
Would love to hear some reasoning from the folks from HMD about this.
I agree that it is similar to Google in that they seem to hedge their bets too much (like how Google has two OS, two languages...etc etc). I would really like a third popular OS...there are so many out there, but with no steam (this, firefoxOS, sailfish...)
> "Symbian is the only platform that has to spend one day teaching people how to use strings before they can code in it. The approved method is that you create an HBufC (a Heap allocated, BUFfer that is Constant), then Call Des() on it (which returns a TPtr - a pointer to a writable descriptor),"
KaiOS is for feature phones only. It has to run just few basic apps. It's not a platform for Nokia.
Funny fact: Nokia sold 75 million phones last year. Only little over 4 million of those were smartphones.
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15293436 is the only source I can find, but I'm sure I've seen it elsewhere)
Considering how much resources some electron apps need and how battery hungry they are, what's the "secret" here? Is it a subset of HTML? Is Firefox that much more efficient than Chromium?
And I know about Android's problems there (and mentioned it). But Windows Phone and FirefoxOS both chased those markets and they're both basically gone now.
It's been running on the Firefox OS quite slow. Having in mind a very poor functionality, I considered to switch to Android. When I installed Android, it was a total game changer. It was fast and smooth (back in 2014 of course, not now) and I never installed Firefox OS again.
FirefoxOS and Ubuntu Touch looked promising, but they lacked good hardware to run on. I'd really like to try Plasma, but I don't like any of the devices it supports.
PostmarketOS is just a way to turn an old phone into a Raspberry Pi type device, but maybe that's the first step in a truly unified mainline kernel for all mobile devices.
It's about as responsive as my Pixel (i.e. not very responsive, not even close to iPhone) and it's a great size.
The problem is, as always, the battery. If I could replace that and install PostMarket, I might use it as my daily driver.
I haven't used Postmarket because no software can fix the battery issues with that phone.
If I could easily swap out the battery and also install Postmarket, I would do both. As of now, I can't get a new battery and will therefore do neither.
[1] https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Motorola+Moto+X+Battery+Replace...
Unrelated to WebOS, but the Pre's wireless charging accessory is IMHO still the best to date.
I much prefer WebOS's approach. On the other hand, in those days you wouldn't really have more than a few apps open at once, unlike iPads which could have dozens of apps or browser tabs. So who knows if WebOS's style would translate well to today's usage patterns.
On the MeeGo OS used on the Nokia N9, it requires swiping in one direction a couple of times to get to the open tasks screen. You can then press and hold on the screen to allow for closing any app(s) you want and click on the done button after you're finished.
Closing an app requires just swiping from the top to the bottom. IIRC, WebOS required you to swipe upward to get to the task screen and then swipe upward again to close the app.
It is somewhat ironical that the Wintel monopoly that standardized so much of PC space ultimately ended up helping Linux desktops, despite the grumblings of UNIX greybeards.
In contrast, there is no obvious need to move away from Android, and if you don't like it, you can move to the iPhone. The Mac was not a good alternative 15 years ago.
Just my humble opinion.
No std msc or service manager gui available either. Some of these existed but were lost in a CADT.
You can get plenty of info about the health of the drive while the system is running.
There isn't much reason to run a filesystem check unless something is wrong.
Speaking of services it's extremely easy to query which services are running and enable and disable stuff. Plus there aren't 85 different things running.
If you insist you can run something like https://github.com/mmstick/systemd-manager
https://rthomsen6.wordpress.com/2016/12/18/introducing-syste...
I’m not a fan of Microsoft biz practices but if you think Linux has nothing to learn from windows (especially on the desktop) you are mistaken.
Basically you were holding it wrong.
OTOH, the Linux- / free Unix-desktop has come a long way since then. For my personal machines, I think GNU/Linux plus MATE makes for a much better desktop than Windows these days. (Admittedly, my taste might be slightly non-mainstream.)
Also, I think terrible security and user experience applies to Android now too.
I don't disagree as of now.
If there'll ever come a time when Android has its Windows security moment, the trigger this time should be Privacy.
I partially switched to Linux just as an adventure, because I could.
After I got past the initial "This is really weird"-phase, Linux was an eye opener. Other than that I use Windows at work, I have not looked back since.
Strictly speaking it is not about GNU/Linux per se, but Windows vs. Unix. One of the BSDs could fill that place just as well, but on Linux, hardware support is usually better, plus the mainstream Linux distros tend to be more friendly to lazy or non-techie users.
My main reason to use Linux distributions was to be able to do university work at home.
After all I wouldn't be able to buy an Aix or DG/UX license, the UNIXes we had on campus before computing department started to deploy Linux based PCs.
I always dual booted and tried a few times to just use it as desktop, but eventually gave up on it.
My travel netbook and mobile devices are the only gear still running some form of Linux.
Are you serious? Android still has a massive fragmentation problem because OEMs/carriers don't provide updates.
> Hardware Kill Switches for Camera, Microphone, WiFi/Bluetooth, and Baseband
but is somewhat unclear on the baseband firmware:
> The mobile baseband will most likely use ROM loaded firmware, but a free software kernel driver.
About baseband, as others note, I get that it's a minefield.
But really, hardware is not a problem from a marketing point of view, from a competition point of view. You can make FxOS to run on the best hardware with supported drivers, but the ecosystem is so behind, eventually users would move away from it. That was the real problem. Consequently, developers would likely give up on FxOS.
Samsung's are all based on Android - which tops iOS's market share by nearly 70%. Neither Ubuntu Touch nor FxOS had any real chances.
I know the person behind this, but not sure of the status
I wish Google would define a "standard" like Intel has with what is and what isn't an "Ultrabook". As in, to be a "Nexus" phone it must have a minimum resolution of ..., it must last for x hours of video playback and x hours of wifi use, it must have the damn alert-killing side switch, it must have a camera of a minimum quality (megapixel/zoom/can record at 1080p@60hz), etc...
Google should be defining what an Android phone is in terms of hardware; define a brand other makers can adopt so customers can trust the standard to at least cater to those needs. And that isn't even getting into how fucking awful the Google Play store is. What a malware magnet.
Sorry this is somewhat off-topic, I just feel this is how Google has lost us and why we seek alternatives.
Famous quote: "quantity has a quality all its own".
The strength of Android is that you can customize it. Some people like Touchwizz. I prefer oxygenOS.
If I were to add to the brief spec I defined above I'd also require speakers at both ends of the phone for stereo output, and require keeping the 3.5mm jack (yay S9?). I still think Samsung likes to make slippery bar-soap phones that I cant hold.
I still don't like how permissions are done even on LineageOS - I wish I could grant access to the camera for an app "for the next 5 minutes".
Now I'm really off topic. I shall diminish ~
Sadly, the newer generation does not have that. Google given up the update to the vendor, which in turn do what they do best, not updating the goddamn phone.
https://source.android.com/devices/architecture/treble
Large parts of Android-the-OS is implemented in middleware running on the same runtime as Android's apps, which should have made this kind of portability possible earlier in the development of Android. But here it is.
OnePlus's phones have that, and it's great. Of course, OnePlus also have some nasty privacy failures … but then, Apple have some nasty openness failures.
I'd love to be able to just buy a decent phone, with a replaceable battery (because the batteries fail first), which I, not some vendor, own.
If Mozilla had simply acquired LineageOS, worked on MicroG to reach feature parity with Play Services, added Firefox for Android and their own app store in addition to Google Play via MicroG, and resold flagship Android phones with that as well as offering it to OEMs, they would have had significant success at very little cost.
In fact, they still could do that.
Instead, they could have gotten all the Android apps and the popularity of Android essentially for free.
It's even possible they could have overtaken Google and became the effective steward of the Android platform, since Google doesn't offer a version that can be installed by users and also doesn't offer their version to OEMs with no strings attached.
Again, they still can do that now, since there still isn't a version of Android that runs on any phone other than LineageOS, which is relatively underfunded.
[obviously what Mozilla would gain from this is market share for Firefox for Android]
On the other hand, I'm already a KaiOS customer because they power the phone I want: the one that makes calls and handles text messages, and then gives me a high-speed network for my computer. I spend about a quarter of my time in India; while there I got a Jio phone and liked it so much I found a KaiOS device that works in the US as well.
No they wouldn't have. They would not get Google Play Services and your MicroG "solution" is ridiculous from a commercial perspective and a violation from a TOS perspective that would be shut down by Google.
>It's even possible they could have overtaken Google and became the effective steward of the Android platform
I don't think you understand the army of developers it takes to maintain and enhance Android on an annual basis nor the millions of dollars it costs Google. To even suggest that they would have overtaken Google and become the steward of the Android platform is ridiculous.
If I have Firefox and thus can load up any Google web page, do I need Google Play Services?
There's no point in having Android if you can't run Android apps, and most Android apps users want are now dependent on Google's proprietary libraries (Play Services). So why would you want an Android fork if you aren't going to be able to run Android apps? Might as well go with KaiOS at that point.
If one does want or need native apps (e.g. for security), then is it possible for a third party to emulate Google Play Services? Or do they use a certificate to prevent third-party clones?
So, while Samsung may ship Tizen and Windows Phone, they may not build phones for Amazon (which caused Amazon a lot of problems back in the day - where will you find a company making portable electronics that will make them a white-label product and not making android phones).
2. MicroG depends on Google's servers, so Google can pull the carpet out of them at any time. And where will you get those millions of apps if Google doesn't let you access the App store? Look at the difficulty Amazon has at getting apps into its store, and it's a larger company willing to pay devs to switch apps to Amazon store. And all the hacks that people use will be closed by Google once they get popular.
Now sure, you can use MicroG as a porting library (so if I have a closed source app relying on firebase I can trivially switch to relying on MicroG and Mozilla's back end - kind of like wine), but you'll still have to recreate all of Google's apps anyways (there's no way Google will publish their apps on an Android fork) and also those apps written by those who don't care to port (unlike wine - where I can use the OEM CD or EXE from the OEM website, there's no official way to get apks out of Play Store)
As for Play Services, they could just have a team whose job is to make MicroG work exactly like Play Services so that all apps work including the Google apps.
The only Google app that you need to replicate is the Play Store client (or really, the downloader, since you can just use the Play Store website for the UI) and then the user can install all the Google apps from the Play Store.
As for getting developers to put apps in their store, it's certainly much easier than getting them to write another app.
Why would they need to acquire LineageOS when they can just fork it for free?
>worked on MicroG to reach feature parity with Play Services
That would have been a TOS violation and would have been instantly shut down by Google.
>their own app store
You can't really compete with the Play store and developers wouldn't bother with it.
>they would have had significant success at very little cost.
No they wouldn't have. It would have reached the same outcome as their Android based FireFox OS did and even faster due to the TOS violations your suggesting.
edit: nevermind:
"KaiOS is based on the Firefox OS open-source project and we are committed to abide by the rules of the applicable open source licenses. Therefore, we’ll make the source code available to the extent required by the applicable open source licenses."
So that's a no on giving back to the B2G which born thee. Nice. Another closed-source OS is just what the mobile space needs.
Which is funny because Mozilla tried that shortly before abandoning the whole project.
Or maybe the phone partners figured out that they could run the project themselves and when mozilla axed it they just moved on.
That being said, I'm trying to get us to open source the "base" version which is provided to OEMs.
Can I assume you're involved with KaiOS development? Android vendors have a terrible reputation about pushing security updates in a timely manner (or at all for devices that aren't the current flagship). Do you have any plans to contractually force or otherwise encourage vendors to push security updates?
That's a bit disingenous. Android wasn't shipping anything and it always released sources, as far as I know. Same for almost any Linux distribution out there. Common courtesy calls for distributing at least "release" versions, like RedHat and even Apple do.
That, to me, sounds like you're currently taking the minimalist "we'll release the bare minimum we are legally forced to, and nothing else" stance, which is basically equivalent to "we are not going to give back anything if we can avoid it".
I do hope this will change in the future, although given the realities of embedded development (cut-throat and all), I wouldn't be surprised if it never did. I think I'll keep rooting for more open players in the space.
If you don't make it open source, that challenge will be levied at every opportunity, and rightly so.
There was this project for FirefoxOS to support J2ME apps -- https://github.com/mozilla/pluotsorbet It would be great to have something like that for "nostalgic" reasons. Many feature phones' users remember J2ME apps, games especially, very fondly. Check out also this J2ME project, which could potentially be ported to KaiOS as well: https://github.com/XerTheSquirrel/SquirrelJME
Also, have you considered some kind of support for "content blocking" (like in iOS, or in the form of typical browser plugin-ins), of course, I'm not saying that ANY content should be blocked by default. But taking into account that devices with KaiOS wouldn't be very powerful, it could be really useful to have such an option to avoid "unnecessary" stuff when browsing the Internet...
Anyway, keep up good work!
If IBM could have chosen a free and open DOS for its first PCs, the market would look very different today.
Software is the problem for these OSes. The only way to be able to compete IMHO is to make it compatible with APKs, installable via a store.
Otherwise, it's a nice effort but you'll never reach the adoption necessary to make it worth continuing working on the project.
I'm just saying that whatever OS will be useless to a lot of people if it doesn't run what they want it to. One way to do that is to make it compatible with Android apps, which have already a version of virtually every major app.
Also, in my original comment I was speaking more in general rather than about KaiOS alone.