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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
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 not? It cost them just $22m and they have another potential competitor locked in
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)
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.
So what do you want that you're not getting? Nothing about Android stops you from writing a web app.