Google Leads Series A Investment Round in KaiOS to Connect Next Billion Users | Hacker News Reader

Google Leads Series A Investment Round in KaiOS to Connect Next Billion Users

kaiostech.com

67 pointsbobajeff35 comments

>KaiOS is a web-based mobile operating system that enables a new category of smart feature phones. It is forked from B2G (Boot to Gecko), a successor of the discontinued Firefox OS. [1]

I'm curious whether they'll stick with Gecko considering Google's influence over the project. I also wonder how they plan on succeeding where Firefox OS failed.

[1] https://developer.kaiostech.com/

They have a much clearer plan than Mozilla. They're not trying to make an Android or iOS competitor, they are trying to make a feature phone OS. Firefox OS actually had some success in poorer markets, but that wasn't considered successful enough to continue investment. KaiOS is actually already successful, they are on the JioPhone which is almost being given away by Jio in India.

Adding some more relevant information:

India is having a digital revolution since the launch of Reliance Jio. They had launched a phone called as JioPhone [1]. This is powered by KaiOS, hence the market share of KaiOS in India has significantly increased. KaiOS is the second most popular mobile OS in India (ahead of iOS)[3].

JioPhone sold nearly 40 million units in the last quarter[2]! This is a huge market for Google to build apps for as well.

[1] https://www.jio.com/en-in/book-jio-phone [2] https://gadgets.ndtv.com/mobiles/news/jio-phone-sales-at-nea... [3] https://yourstory.com/2018/05/kaios-powers-jiophone-indias-n...

Why are they developing so many different mobile OS platforms at the same company? Android, Fuchsia, and now KaiOS?

They mention it is a web based OS. That might lead to less fragmentation though if it takes off. The browser API's are very close to native and it sucks having to develop for Web / iOS / Android. If mobile phones adopted Web technologies and they were extended with a few more hardware APIs development would be much easier.

KaiOS targets feature phones -- a space I'm guessing Google (and know Apple) has no desire to get into. This helps Google to ease along the pre-loading of Google branded apps onto KaiOS devices.

Given Fuchsia core design, i think they will probably target this space with it, and use the "Android layer" for more powerful phones.

I would bet they will migrate Android to run inside ChromiumOS, and make a flavor of Chromium running on Linux and other running on Zircon.

For feature phones they would use the zircon+chromium+webish-dart-framework variation and the linux+chromium+android on powerful phone, until Zircon is mature enough to replace Linux in all fronts.

At least its what i would do if i were them, and its how i project their future steps in this domain space.

So the KaiOS would be competing with the Zircon+Flutter variation, and i guess they are just betting in another horse to make their chances even better to be dominant also in feature phones.

Pretty smart move, given they have a lot of cash to spare.

>>* Why are they developing so many different mobile OS platforms at the same company? Android, Fuchsia, and now KaiOS?*

why not? It cost them just $22m and they have another potential competitor locked in

KaiOS, like Firefox OS before it, is not and can never be a potential competitor. Google is investing to help get its services on a popular feature-phone system for the ultra-low-end in developing nations. That's basically the extent of it.

Is kaios going to take off? It hard to say, but if we're going to get a third way in mobile, this is how it will happen. This is how Microsoft was making progress, and one of the ways they lost when they changed strategy for Windows mobile 10.

Get people on low end devices; either sell something for less than a low end Android, or sell something that does noticably better than a low end Android for about the same money. Sell a better device every year (os improvements, better CPU, more memory, whatever; just make sure people have something to upgrade too). You can sell some nicer models too, but push the low end ones. Price constrained users are a lot less picky, but can drive user numbers needed to gather developers, and developers are needed to get higher end users. Don't throw away the apis for every release, unless you really have to; especially don't call the new api 'universal' when it doesn't target older versions (which actually have users).

It's easier to go upmarket when you have adoption than to bring things down market (I think we're on Google's third try at Android for bargain basement phones, but it's hard to use mainstream apps unless you have multiple gigs of RAM)

>> If mobile phones adopted Web technologies

Sigh. I must be old.

I've already lived through 2 major initiatives to do just this first with Palm OS and more recently FireFox OS. We all see the benefit from a developer standpoint but as an absolute, positively web-first proponent I really don't see the motivation for the device manufacturers. Why would it be in the interest of any incumbent to increase app portability? Also, the vision of the web OS as the "great leveler" really breaks down when you start trying to utilize things like location and the camera and NFC, etc. Even within just Palm OS devices this was a major problem. Each new model needed new APIs to the underlying hardware, app updates and a bunch of checks for functionality. It was the worst parts of web development, all the time.

KaiOS is a fork of Firefox OS according to their site.

Yes, I think Apple has been slow to implement web API's into Safari for that very reason. It took them forever to get Service Workers. Also, if the browser can do it, why would people pay them 30% of the app?

I don't know about NFC but I know bluetooth and camera is not that much of an issue in mobile browsers. They are decently supported.

Service workers on mobile have been resisted for data use, performance, and battery life reasons. There’s no great conspiracy, it’s sunpky that your average user isn’t going to be happy if a random website sucks up half their data allowance for the month and kills their battery in 2 hours even after they ‘closed the browser’

Also privacy concerns; every one of those features can help track you.

It’s not the manufacturers that lack the motivation - it’s end users. The current app-based world is what they want. Little silos for each app, even to the point of having different UI paradigms. Developers don’t see the world that same way users do, and it blinds us sometimes to their desires.

Not those developers that decide to invest into a specific platform, though.

>Why are they developing so many different mobile OS platforms at the same company ?

As the title say , Google is just investing in it. They don't develop the codebase of the OS.

They want to push their free services to collect data , it's their business model after all.

Also it's designed for emerging market , KaiOS phone don't have touch screen, they are supposed to be super lightweight, as a matter of fact they already have a billion users which I personally found to be insane for a startup I've never heard of.

They already have a billion users?

No. According to the CEO earlier this year:

> With 20 million active users as of February 2018, Codeville said he’s targeting between 120 to 150 million active KaiOS users by the end of the year.

-- https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/kaios-smarter-feature-p...

That is what Google does. Just look at how many messenging systems they have.

Control.

Remember that Google isn't a product company. Their business is selling attention of the users who use their internet products.

Devices and OSs are adjacent to their business so, they don't care which ones win, they just want to make sure no large player emerges in them. When you have near-monopoly power, you want the layers adjacent to you to be commodities.

That's why they bought Android, put a lot of resources behind it, and open sourced it. It prevented Microsoft, Samsung, or anyone else from owning mobile OSs the way Microsoft had owned the desktop in the past generation.

Isn't that called dumping?

Have you heard of iOS ? Samsung has Tizen that they use in smart watches.

Tizen SDK has been rebooted so many times and is renowned for its bad quality, I doubt anyone besides Samsung is developing for it.

> If mobile phones adopted Web technologies

So what do you want that you're not getting? Nothing about Android stops you from writing a web app.

Politics.

It is also what tanked Longhorn, Singularity and Midori at Microsoft.

Has driven the whole differences in development between DevTools which owned .NET and Windows/Office teams that owned C and C++ development.

Which now with the latest reorg are the same unit, but lets see there how it goes still.

I've seen some commits on CAF regarding KaiOS's involvement, but where exactly are they hosting the source for their projects? Do they have any intentions whatsoever to release the sources?

Firefox OS goes from open-source to closed-source KaiOS, now funded, in part, by Google. Sad.

edit: Oh darn:

"Many parts of B2G (especially Gaia) are under a permissive (Apache) license which allows modified code to be released under another license, so not all of B2G necessarily has to remain open source. It’s made of many components though so the legal situation is probably quite complex, there are likely some parts that Kai OS Technologies should provide the source code for."

Oh well.

"KaiOS originates from the Firefox OS open-source project started in 2011, and has continued independently from Mozilla since 2016" [1]

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/2qihtgrzllws8ki/AABmo9X1KMT6lHnvh...

This looks very promising for people like my parents, for whom using a touch-screen device is much more difficult than using one with hard buttons.

They each have an iPhone/iPad to look at photos and read/send emails, but their mobile phones are low-end Doro devices with nice large text and a comfortably-sized numeric keypad.

The Wikipedia page lists the Nokia 8110 (coming out in the UK in a few days), a Doro phone, and a couple of others.

Can anyone with experience using one of these as a daily driver share their thoughts?

A few years ago, there were several promising alternative mobile operating systems. WebOs, Ubuntu mobile, SailfishOS, Tizen (a continuation of Nokia's Maemo/Meego), and of course Firefox OS. Nokia also had another in house OS that was killed off before it got a chance to ship called Meltemi.

Most of these had a few things in common:

- they were linux based - they were aimed at cheaper form factors where Android made less sense - (mostly) web based development kits - all of them struggled to get traction/market share - at the core of their failures was the success off the android and apple app stores.

So, what has changed? App stores are less relevant than ever. People still install apps of course but mostly apps are struggling to compete for attention. It requires a huge marketing budgets to get anywhere near the top hundred of apps and if you are not in there, people won't find you. So, a good mobile web experience is key for a lot of services out there and with stuff like progressive web apps (which Firefox OS sort of pioneered) you can get away with not having a fully native app. Many 'native' apps are in fact partially web based these days.

So, KaiOs makes sense. Android is still expensive to run and producing hardware platforms in volume based on chipsets that were considered state of the art ten years ago is really cheap. Android never really ran well on those. Which is why you see these operating systems targeting cheap platforms. Web based development kits make total sense. Of course, mobile linux makes a lot of sense since it basically runs on all of these platforms and there is a huge existing investment in things like drivers.

Google investing in this also makes total sense. Android is not going to run well on these devices but they still want people to buy into the Google eco system. Fuchsia is not aimed at this space either and instead intended to replace Android, eventually. It may scale down better than Android of course but everything I'm reading about it suggests that's not the main goal. So investing in this is a low risk, high reward type situation for Google.

Apple of course never really cared about low end. The margins are too small for them. They only do high margin products.

Sailfish had its chance with Intex. They hugely underestimated the opportunity they had with the launch of Jio, and pushed off on supporting VOLTE. Sailfish tanked despite being a great OS on a relatively cheap handset (< $100); lost the opportunity to gain a foothold.

Symbian already had a Web runtime.

In 10 years we will still be discussing how web will replace native apps, unless the browser has been rebooted into a general purpose VM running WebAssembly apps.

I keep seeing this issue how it is hard to get attention in the store, the Web is no different.

Other than whatever calls my attention on HN and Reddit, I only use the same 10 sites since the last decade.

Wouldn't expensive smartphones today be as cheap as feature phones tomorrow? E.g. Samsung Galaxy Note 3 now only $100. The point is, hardware will be cheaper and faster, and eventually smartphones will be affordable, no?

Feature phone is kinda dead when you can buy a "Chindroid" for $20 bucks

But it is easy guess why Google still wants to place this bet

Google doesn't want to sell hardware. They want to pull the next billion into their platform. Did you catch the Google Assistant icon in the article?

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