Linux-based 4G phones with Google Assistant sold for $7 in Indonesia | Hacker News Reader

Linux-based 4G phones with Google Assistant sold for $7 in Indonesia

tuxphones.com

309 pointscunidev200 comments

Having spent a couple of years building apps for KaiOS (which is really Firefox OS), I can say that it's probably the easiest development platform out there - mostly pure web; with some proprietary extensions.

I wish Firefox OS hadn't thrown in the towel so early. These devices are selling millions of units every month.

Was Firefox OS targetting this kind of phone though? I thought it was trying to be a touch-screen smartphone OS.

Wasn't really, although their focus was on low cost phones too. Credit to KaiOS for recognizing the potential of non-touch devices.

However, the effort required to enable a non-touch UI would have been a small fraction of the overall FirefoxOS effort. Something Mozilla could have responded to, if the team was intact.

The non-touch concept was under development when firefox os was cancelled.

Yup. FFOS actually convinced me that even high-end devices built on open web technologies could work quite well enough for today's usecases. I'd buy one today if I could - not a low end device but a Snapdragon 8xx device.

Web is good enough for 90% of apps, and a bare metal SDK would be needed for games.

PWAs did it for me.

Even WebGL 2.0 alongside WebAssembly will be good enough for Flash like games (Google Chrome team will give a talk about WebGPU at IO).

Like the old Palm Pre?

WebOS was ahead of its time.

Symbian as well.

Many of the supposed iOS "innovations" were already there.

Is, not "was." My LG television runs WebOS.

...as a conduit to barf ads at you. I wish I could have gotten my TV without ask the parts that forced me to install a PiHole just to not get ads overlaid onto my menus. Any good parts of webOS are now just incidental.

I just banned the TV’s MAC address from my network. IMO there’s no reason for it to connect to the outside world.

Good solution if you can do it, but my girlfriend likes watching YouTube and Sling through it. :-/

The WebOS that runs in your television is very unlike the WebOS that was.

That ecosystem, interface, and community no longer exist.

Also your comment doesn’t really make sense.

Something that currently exists can still have been ahead of its time. My comment isn’t an indication it doesn’t exist.

firefox os had so much potential, now with pwa's being the next big thing, it seem like firefox os could be a game changer. Too bad they killed it.

what is pwa ?

Progressive Web Apps

Progressive Web App. A web app that's supposed to be indistinguishable from the native one, built using web technologies (so that you don't have to maintain multiple code bases).

When Firefox OS was around, they were still pretty niche.

Firefox OS was doomed to fail. They created an operating system which used the slowest rendering and JS engine there was and put it in the worst hardware they could find.

These phones run on the same rendering and JS engine...

"KaiOS apps are based on web technologies–HTML, CSS, and JavaScript–and are run by Gecko runtime."

https://developer.kaiostech.com/

Except that Firefox is phasing out Gecko and replacing it with Servo (we're not yet there but some components have been replaced already - this is what the Firefox Quantum thing was all about). So this KaiOS thing is basically picking up an abandoned project...

Servo is nowhere near production-ready and there's no reason to assume that it will be anytime soon.

Just consider that Mozilla is pretty much working full-pelt on Gecko and merely keeping up with Google. They (as well as Google) are far away from implementing all currently specified web-standards, of which more get specified all the time.

So, in order to get Servo to the level of current browser engines, they would have to have an even higher developmemt velocity, while not really being able to stop developing Gecko in the meantime either.

Maybe if the majority of components someday are shared between Gecko and Servo, they might do the final step and switch out the core completely, but even that is still far away.

Servo is specifically a research project. To explore what could be done, if one were to do things right. That they were able to isolate and share components, that even came as a surprise to Mozilla.

Also, Servo isn't a general-purpose browser project anymore at Mozilla. It's part of the "Mixed Reality" department:

https://blog.servo.org/2018/03/09/servo-and-mixed-reality/

Servo, while a research project, is also a place to build the fastest possible implementation of a browser (w/o full backwards compatibility), then crib the best performing parts and move that into mainline Firefox (what Project Quantum is, a metered replacement of Gecko).

Swapping out the jet engine of Firefox in flight (Gecko) was likely to be a very bumpy, messy road, thus Mozilla has chosen to break the problem down into manageable chunks by having a parallel team build Servo and push the bleeding edge of performance & features, while having another team break the new code (Servo) and the old code (Gecko) apart into the separate , interchangeable pieces, then clean up standards compliance in the new Servo module and prep it to be replaced.

Essentially, its the Cathedral vs the Bazaar all over again. Microsoft Edge was a ground up rewrite of most of the browser (the Cathedral model of software dev) along with Android (built behind closed doors at Google, then code dumped right before a new major release). Mozilla didn't like how this model could easily backfire, choosing a more metered approach by developing smaller, swappable components in the open.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum

Gecko is the rendering engine. The JS engine is called SpiderMonkey.

I'd be interested in this on a modern smartphone platform with a touchscreen and virtual keyboard just to cut Google out of my life.

> just to cut Google out of my life.

Apple?

Out of the frying pan into the fire...

So it looks, but, realistically is the only option for phones. And it is not an adtech company, you pay for hardware and software.

Why not run Lineage OS then?

I dunno, switching from a phone with a pre-installed Google maintained OS to a custom rom of a Google maintained OS isn't exactally fully cutting Google out.

AOSP and its derivatives may be maintained by Google but they don't call home without the proprietary Google apps. Just leave those off and use something like F-Droid to get apps and you're Google-free. None of the Android devices I use (phones and tablets) has any Google-proprietary code installed, all of them work fine without such.

Lineage is Android sans Google. It's exactly what you want if you want to cut Google out.

You could run https://e.foundation/

Wait for Pine Phone for $150 [0] or preorder Librem 5 for $649 [1]. However expect beta experience either way.

Also remember that you probably don't want to entirely cut Google out of your life, as for example Linux have Google salaried developers. But that's, I imagine, not what you meant.

[0] https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=7339 - no canonical site yet

[1] https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/

Why wait for a $150 phone or preorder a $649 phone while more or less the same thing is available on a $7 phone in India? I think that $7 phone should go on sale in other countries as well, either in its current guise or - probably at a higher price - without the Google bits. It would certainly be an interesting device to use in circumstances where pricey and vulnerable smart phones don't make sense - e.g. when crossing unfriendly borders, when working outside in the dirt where that smart phone always runs the risk of being damaged or lost, etc.

Google invested in it not for it to be available without them. So I say it's not gonna happen even with higher price. They would also not like a suggestion that the same phone without their software is somehow more valuable. Also I feel that the GP asked for less hypothetical options, not more.

I would certainly pay more to avoid Google.

"Linux-based 4G phones with Google Assistant " i was ok with the first phrase, the second was like grain alcohol spiking a fine bourbon.

The reason i would buy a linux phone would be to avoid having a MITM burned onto the rom of my phone. The device presented in this article doesnt provide that nessecity.

I think the law of averages applies, not knowing how much google and others payout to burn kruft into peoples product, im going to guess that the increased global saturation level of google ASSistant is worth it for google and a good revenue for the OEM. ill bet the price is subsidied to 7$, i would pay 70$ for this phone, if it had no google ass in it.

They needed the resources to integrate pocket into firefox

It's kind of funny that PWA was Jobs original vision for iOS apps with HTML5, before they came up with the walled garden cash cow approach.

> “The full Safari engine is inside of iPhone. And so, you can write amazing Web 2.0 and Ajax apps that look exactly and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone. And these apps can integrate perfectly with iPhone services. And guess what? There’s no SDK that you need! You’ve got everything you need if you know how to write apps using the most modern web standards to write amazing apps for the iPhone today. So developers, we think we’ve got a very sweet story for you. You can begin building your iPhone apps today.” - Steve Jobs/iPhone announcement Jan 2007 at macworld

https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/2019-the-year-of-progr...

What's old, is new again, 12 years later. It's how it always should have been. And guess what? There's no SDK that you need!! ;)

An idea that was already being explored on Symbian with their WebRuntime actually.

https://web.archive.org/web/20100603124720/http://www.forum....

I feel like the whole Symbian ecosystem disappeared, it's a shame nobody is preserving any of the software, that was 10+ years of tech that is basically gone.

Quite true.

All what is left seems to be Web Archive and these sites.

http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/

It's not like this went away, though. You could always, and still can, write iOS apps this way. Safari even has the "add to home screen" feature which lets you run these apps without the Safari chrome around them.

Safari/Webkit still lags behind the other browsers, and finally started adding the basic features for PWAs last year.

It's nice that a lot has been implemented, albeit slowly. Though some may still think about Apple incentives.

I.e.: http://nolanlawson.com/2015/06/30/safari-is-the-new-ie/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19586219

PWAs make sense today, but back then, they just came too early in the game. The iPhone only had EDGE (2G) networking, it was painfully slow both in terms of throughput and latency. Each HTTP request would take ~300-500ms under optimal cell coverage.

Additionally, unlike modern PWAs, web-apps back then had persistence for data only, so you had to reload the entire application over the network at each launch. People back then loved the switch to native apps because they were extremely snappier.

Worked well for i-mode in 1999 - of course that did do some magic on the protocol level.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-mode

that doesn't make any sense. All the limitations you mention also applied to apps.

the whole problem is that apple shipped native apps with tons of skeumorphism and animations, so all js frameworks for webapps spend all their efforts to simulate "slide animation on page change" instead of working on hiding the ajax latency or using local storage better.

and in the end, everyone just saw $$$ in using the closed apps from the store.

> PWAs make sense today, but back then, they just came too early in the game.

Seemed to work well enough on webOS for the Palm Pre.

I don't know about its potential but what was there was not a serious challenger to the existing platforms.

I was working for a very large app (tens of millions of daily users) at the time when firefox was trying to convince companies to port their apps to it.

We were big enough that Firefox sent their advocates to our offices and tried to convince us to port our app. Since what we were offering was a service, we were naturally open to have it on as many platforms as possible. I think that there might have been a monetary incentive as well but I might be misremembering there (I was not part of that negotiation).

After a week with their sdk and help from their devs, we threw the towel.

Publishing our product on Fos would have been impossible while keeping the app quality on par with iOS and Android and there were lots of missing/buggy APIs.

That was our last discussion with Firefox. For as long as there have been phones, there have been web apps targeting them, but there is a reason why we are still building native apps.

Are PWAs the next big thing? I thought the hype for PWAs had for the most part fizzled due to lack of user interest.

It’s not the users that are pushing native apps on every website. It’s not even the developers. It’s the media and add companies that realise that they can get away with things in a native app that a browser would never allow.

I hope it's got a lot more polished, I got one of the first firefox phones and it was pretty unusable in most areas.

I pretty quickly got an Android phone instead.

Is there much difference between development of a KaiOS app, and a ChromiumOS app?

> KaiOS (which is really Firefox OS)

Thats news to me. I read that KaiOS was built from the ground up & not derived from anything.

> Firefox OS hadn't thrown in the towel so early

That was a rather quite event and I was surprised to see no much discussion around it. An OS by Mozilla can be more trusted than an OS by Google. Why did Mozilla kill the project?

> Thats news to me. I read that KaiOS was built from the ground up & not derived from anything.

Where did you read that? Read the first sentence of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS (all with good citations, e.g., https://support.kaiostech.com/support/solutions/articles/350... )

Wow. I didn't check the wikipedia entry for KaiOS earlier.

But the weird thing is that I recently read in some magazine (I am unable to remember the name) about Google investing in KaiOS which was a Brazilian company and the whole article was mentioning how Silicon Valley is unable to understand its customers as they live in a bubble and how its the companies in developing countries that truly understand the needs of the customer and deliver. Its mentioned that KaiOS is gunning at Android for #1 in India and Google's investment was a sign of acceptance and a hint that the new version of Android will get shelved soon. It even referred to India based Zoho as the true challenger to Google Apps & Office 360. Also how wechat is miles ahead of Whatsapp & likes and how in a sense it challenges the whole Silicon Valley in terms of all the features it has. Basically it was urging the readers to not assume that silicon valley products as superior and try others too.

I hope Mozilla reconsiders and starts up Firefox OS again. I prefer it over a company driven product like KaiOS.

P.S. Just noticed that the last name of the KaiOS's CEO is "Codeville".

We're likely approaching the day when it'll be more cheap to attempt to build an open Linux phone from scratch rather than keep waiting for a manufacturer to listen to a few thousand techies who don't want their personal data chewed by proprietary OSes. That milestone will almost certainly be marked by the availability of cheap 3/4G modems (I'd be perfectly fine with 3G if it was the only option). We're not there but chipsets are becoming cheaper with every portable router or dongle sold, so it's a matter of time. Cheap and small SBCs, displays, batteries and 3D printed cases are already here waiting for the 3/4G chipset to be added.

What about cheap cellular data service for your hackphone?

While true, Web based OSes are exactly the opposite of that regarding privacy.

That's right. This already is happening. I got bored of waiting for "Linux smartphone" and accidentally found that it's actually quite easy and affordable to build a wearable computer from scratch. And I built myself one of course. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/c...

I just used new generation of the same display, and a one handed Twiddler 3 keyboard.

Raspberry pi doesn't have cellular, so I am looking at Zero phone project which has a solution. But so far I am already extracting value from my wearable computer in many easily implementable use cases.

What's battery life like? I'm building a (non-wearable) Pi with touchscreen but haven't been able to get a good estimate.

The screen is the part to choose wisely if you want good battery life.

The pi cannot be a good option if battery life is a concern.

Battery lasted for almost 4 days when I left just RPi Zero W, idling, connected to Wifi, without X11 running.

Battery I am using is this: https://tech.scargill.net/ravpower-the-ultimate-pi-ups/

It indeed helpfully maintains stable power output when being plugged and unplugged from mains itself. But only on one of the output ports. Also this is not always true when there's active power consumer on the second port. Other than that, I'm happy I found this powerbank model.

Non-amp url: https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/7/27/16035508/d...

Yeah, terribly sorry, I just pasted it without looking, was on the phone.

One more reason why we badly need FOSS+H phones :) Interesting project btw. And really good battery life, although in idle, considering the RPis aren't certainly optimized for low consumption like other boards are.

I've been looking at this (most recently, got a 3.5" touchscreen for a RasPi3B+), but an option for a Linux handheld that fits in your pocket today might be off-the-shelf smartphone device with PostmarketOS: https://postmarketos.org/

PostmarketOS is still in a developers-only state, and there's a lot of directions you could take everything that's atop the kernel. My own whim was to incrementally build the userland in Racket (though that's on hold during job search); notes: https://www.neilvandyke.org/postmarketos/

The cheapest 4G modem I can find is still $80. I wonder how they are making the entire phone for just $7

The SoC they are using (Qualcomm 205) seems to be less than $10 in single unit quantities: https://www.kynix.com/Detail/1331087/MSM8905.html

From that site:

1+: $9.87257

10+: $9.31375

100+: $8.78655

500+: $8.28920

1000+: $7.82000

That is absurdly cheap, and you can be sure with million-unit orders they're probably getting half that price and working direct with the manufacturer. $7.82 per unit @ 1000 for that feature set[1] brings it into the realm of hobbyists to make their own phones. Order the chips, prototype PCB, battery, charger circuit, low-res touchscreen , and mounts for USB+SD+audio from China and get them within a week. 3D print some cases, spend 20 days trying to get video output working on the completely undocumented Chinese display, boom. Made your own functional (but ugly and bad) phone for < $35.

[1]: https://www.qualcomm.com/products/qualcomm-205-mobile-platfo...

Looks like the Qualcomm 205 is a pin compatible replacement for the Snapdragon 210/212, whereby they figured out they could trim out a few hardware chunks (H.265 decoding & 8MP camera support) and save on manufacturing (smaller dies) and licensing costs.

Plus, this cheaper chip can be dropped into phone designs from 2014 (Snapdragon 210) and 2015 (Snapdragon 212) with little to no engineering or software work. Seems like a great way to reuse tested cheap phone designs without additional cost or delay in getting products to market.

There are however some interesting cheaper cards/adapters/dongles worth of investigating.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/lt4120-Snapdragon-X5-LTE-T77...

https://www.amazon.com/powerday-Mini-PCI-Adapter-Module/dp/B...

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/2017-Newest-SIM-Card-4G-LTE-...

Last one is a complete hotspot and apparently can use the USB port either as a 4G modem (maybe WiFi card also through an internal hub?) or as a power supply port when stuck on a power bank.

Thanks for the links! One note about the last one is that it looks like it only supports WCDMA: 2100MHz so Verizon is your only option for 4G coverage but they don't support LTE B1/B3 according to this chart (could be outdated)

https://www.droid-life.com/2015/02/05/us-wireless-carrier-ba...

Band 13 is Verizon's 700Mhz LTE band, and is the core of Verizon's coverage. Band 4 (2.1Ghz downlink from tower, 1.7Ghz uplink from phone) would be nice for speed, but isn't strictly necessary to build something that has LTE. The only major sticking point with this is Verizon has a nasty habit of letting non-approved devices (like this) run for a few weeks, then suddenly bricking them without any notice.

This module meanwhile will work on all of T-Mobile's bands and all of AT&T's commonly deployed bands: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/EC25-AF-Mini-Pcie-CAT4-Wirel...

Neither T-Mobile or AT&T will brick your unapproved device, unlike Verizon.

Can you be more specific about that bricking? Although I'm in Europe, so no Verizon over here, it still concerns me that a carrier can render a communication device inoperable.

I imagine he means they blacklist the IMEI, rendering the device useless in the country (if there’s only one carrier that supports the device’s band).

Ah ok, I thought they would mess remotely with the cards FTDI style [1], turning them into paperweights.

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/ftdi-admits-to-bricking-innoce...

Verizon picks up that the IMEI of the device on the line is different than the one that is on file for your line, attempts to update it, and in the process of doing so breaks service on your line. You can swap over to a working Verizon supported device and swap back, but it could be hours to weeks later when you get this issue occurring again.

AT&T completely bricked SM-T337A trying to root. I should have read more carefully but every other version of that tablet is rootable except AT&Ts. Attempting to root with my version results in an endless bootloop with no way to restore because they havent released a signed version of their kernel to restore to. Obviously this is outside the ToS but my point is to elucidate that they protect their devices from modification to the low level baseband aggressively

Apart from the Google tie-in, I've been wanting a KaiOS phone ever since they were announced. I actually miss the days of my Nokia E71; a stripped down but modern feature phone with battery life measured in days instead of hours would be a blessing.

Unfortunately these are not marketed at all in the Western world and probably wouldn't work on domestic carriers.

In the US there's the Alcatel Go Flip on T-Mobile, Sprint and AT&T (at least I think the "Cingular Flip 2" is similar).

https://us.alcatelmobile.com/alcatel-go-flip/

FWIW it apparently uses an older, pre–Google-investment KaiOS.

Good to know, thanks! I may pick one up and put it on my Ting account to use at work (my iPhone is on Xfinity Mobile for the next couple of months until I move it back to Ting as well). I'm constantly watching my battery life at work because I have my desk line forwarded to it (I'm never at my desk very long until the end of the day).

Edit: It's $100 new which isn't too bad, but less than $40 open box on eBay and other sites. That's practically impulse buy territory. I'll definitely have to consider it.

"I actually miss the days of my Nokia E71"

A Nokia E71 was my daily driver for about a year, starting in 2010. I loved:

- the hardware (slim yet solid, keyboard only slightly worse than a Blackberry, nice tapered+curved edges)

- the extensive list of features (e.g. Wifi+3G, built-in SIP client, support for Exchange ActiveSync)

- support from important apps (e.g. Skype)

I hated:

- How finicky it was. I lost count of the number of times I had set up the mail client again (maybe after re-installing it) because it stopped syncing. (This was back when GSuite free accounts supported ActiveSync, which allowed push email.)

- The weirdness around selecting Wifi or 3G connection (I don't recall exactly what the issue was, but I remember there was something confusing about it).

Agreed. The only one is Nokia 8110, which doesn't support WhatsApp and which is actually somewhat overpriced IMO (a Nokia 1 with Android costs less and the "keyboard cover" doesn't make too much sense to me). The new 3310 would have made more sense.

Because that phone is supposed to be a reference to the original one.

I'm in Canada and have both the Alcatel Go Flip and the CAT B35 and they both work here and in the US.

Not only does GNU/Linux appear to be unkillable, it always seems to take over every single market niche overlooked by larger, established players promoting fully or partially proprietary stacks. And in many cases, these niche markets end up being quite large or even mainstream. Amazing.

We spent so long waiting for linux on the desktop. Turns out insurgency was the best strategy: sit back, launch a few attacks, and wait for the desktop to die ;)

The desktop has been replaced by laptops and 2-1 foldables, it won't die that easily, specially since Android apps on tablets and 2-1 keep beinging maximized phone apps.

> The desktop has been replaced by laptops and 2-1 foldables

Whoa, let's not get ahead of ourselves. Pholdables are not even being sold yet, let alone "replacing the desktop".

I think the parent meant 2-1 foldable laptops. Laptops that convert to tablets.

They certainly are pretty nice... writing this from an HP Specter x360 ;)

Sure they are, I mean devices like the Surface.

Ah, not pholdables, laptablets? We need more classes of devices!

My last 3 computers were all foldable laptops. My current foldable laptop is a Dell with 4k screen and nvidia graphics card and digital pen.

In other words - while there is Linux running in the background (what is left of it anyway), it benefits mostly tech behemots. Not only that, the user is left with virtually no control over the OS. Good luck trying to change OS on your latest Android phone - sure, with a combination of effort and compromises you can actualy do it, but it turns out the phone is almost unusable without the (proprietary) Google Play and related services.

And now Google generously writes a check for $20M to KaiOS... No strings attached I'm sure.

It makes me sad that the phone platforms are not free (not just as beer, but especially free as in freedom). It makes me furious that "smaller" players (Sony and the like) weren't strong and smart enough to step together and create an open platform that would avoid Google's control. But I guess when you are strong enough to do that, you no longer have the incentive to. So the users are left with a bunch of bad options... Basically, we are free to choose one or more of: walled garden, data stealing^W^Wadvertising, spyware, UX disaster. Nice. </rant>

KaiOS offers a decent package.

But unfortunately, there are many things missing yet.

- decent crypto base - decent set of apps (with contraints on user/input interfaces) [ as of now, there isn't an email app available yet! ]

And pretty much every phone vendor/TelCo is building a walled-garden and an appstore on their own, considering the licensing possibilities offered by KaiOS. Every TelCo will block sideloading of apps and restrict users from offering a full fledged KaiOS experience, as it turned out in the Android world.

Jio runs Jio AppStore. >> Please note: while the JioPhone runs on KaiOS, its app store is managed by Reliance Jio and called the JioStore. For this reason, we can’t guarantee the below apps will be available on the JioPhone, nor does it mean apps available on the JioPhone are available in other countries.

From https://www.kaiostech.com/meet-the-apps-available-on-kaios/

>decent crypto base

I haven't used kaiOS, but if WhatsApp E2E encryption was possible doesn't it mean that it has decent crypto for implementing RSA/ECC i.e just like a web browser?

There is an email app in the set of core apps. If it's not in the device you got, talk to the carrier/OEM who may have chosen to remove it when customizing their build.

It's a stretch to call these "Linux-based" phones. The kernel [1] comes from an old Android fork of Linux 3.10 which is nearly 6 years old. Android kernel code is largely incompatible with mainline Linux which is the reason there are very few phones that can run actually run mainline (real) Linux.

[1] https://github.com/kaiostech/kernel_msm-3.10

>which is the reason there are very few phones that can run actually run mainline (real) Linux.

You mean the drivers not being in the Linux Kernel/hard to port ? because I have a very hard time believing most smartphones couldn't run the Linux kernel, provided it's compiled to whatever architecture and the drivers are there.

Android Linux is quite different from upstream Linux, specially after Project Treble.

Now it looks more like a pseudo-mikrokernel, with drivers running on their own processes, talking via Android IPC with the kernel layer.

Also it has a much more security knobs turned on as mainline, and many features trimmed down that are irrelevant to Android userspace.

Treble is just another layer of abstraction on top of HALs and more binder use. Android HALs don't replace kernel drivers and so it's still the same distance from mikrokernel as it ever was, and neither did Treble further the split from mainline Linux.

If anything, Android 8 reduced the gap to mainline with switching e.g. to DRM synchronization fences.

Reading through AOSP documentation and AOSP source code tells another story.

> Binderized HALs. HALs expressed in HAL interface definition language (HIDL). These HALs replace both conventional and legacy HALs used in earlier versions of Android. In a Binderized HAL, the Android framework and HALs communicate with each other using binder inter-process communication (IPC) calls. All devices launching with Android 8.0 or later must support binderized HALs only.

> Passthrough HALs. A HIDL-wrapped conventional or legacy HAL. These HALs wrap existing HALs and can serve the HAL in binderized and same-process (passthrough) modes. Devices upgrading to Android 8.0 can use passthrough HALs.

> All other HALs provided by the vendor image can be in passthrough OR binderized mode. In a fully Treble-compliant device, all of these must be binderized.

> Legacy HALs (also deprecated in Android 8.0) are interfaces that predate conventional HALs. A few important subsystems (Wi-Fi, Radio Interface Layer, and Bluetooth) are legacy HALs. While there's no uniform or standardized way to describe a legacy HAL, anything predating Android 8.0 that is not a conventional HAL is a legacy HAL. Parts of some legacy HALs are contained in libhardware_legacy, while other parts are interspersed throughout the codebase.

https://source.android.com/devices/architecture/hal-types

A binderized HAL driver only requires a minimal kernel surface, if anything.

Furthermore, I specifically stated pseudo on my description.

Nothing you quoted changes anything. Yes, they added more abstraction on top of HALs. No, that doesn't mean HALs are now any "closer to the metal" than before.

Here are some obvious hints to why this is not true:

* there are no HALs defined for even 1/3rd of what kernel drivers you would need to run a modern device

* a bunch of the HALs require you to provide handles obtained from standardized kernel interfaces (e.g. the aforementioned sync objects)

Finally, of course: all HALs run in userland! All their power is in being granted SELinux access to various kernel interfaces! Vendors can not change these rules or risk failing certification.

> > Legacy HALs (also deprecated in Android 8.0) are interfaces that predate conventional HALs. A few important subsystems (Wi-Fi, Radio Interface Layer, and Bluetooth) are legacy HALs.

Android kernels are forked up to six times [1] which results in kernels that have diverged significantly from mainline. Mainlining a device is no way near as trivial a task as you make it out to be. Have a look at how many Android mobile phones have a least bare minimal mainline Linux support [2][3], then have a look at postmarketOS's mainlining guide [4] and you'll get some idea.

[1] https://source.android.com/devices/architecture/kernel/andro...

[2] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...

[3] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...

[4] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Mainlining_Guide

I have the version two Nokia 8110 banana phone with KAIOS. First, web dev isn't good enough for me. I need crypto libraries on the device. Second,unless I've yet to discover how to turn it on, no predictive text input. Third, it ships with Google apps which, combined with the fact that you cannot uninstall apps on KaiOS makes the phone a novelty at best. More like a waste of €60 (none of these issues are obvious before making a purchase).

/Edit - battery lasted two weeks between charges.

"Edit - battery lasted two weeks between charges"

Way to bury the lead! I'd put up with a lot for charge times that long. Or just a backup phpne

Minor nit, but I always appreciate receiving these -- in US English as well as British I believe it's always written "bury the lede"

I don't think that's the case. Lede is at best an alternative spelling, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_paragraph#Spelling

and FWIW, I'm British and I've never seen it spelt lede outside of this forum. I guess it's an American thing, and even then, it's pretty wrong.

I'm British and I'd spell it as lede, that's how I've predominantly seen it spelt also.

So as clear as mud then!

FWIW, I'm British and I've only ever seen it spelt 'lead' by Americans on this forum :)

If you don't use any apps out of distaste you can get pretty impressive battery life on any phone.

Interesting, I had completely missed KaiOS; apparently it's a successor of FirefoxOS, based on some common components.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16461016

JioPhone, which runs on KaiOS has managed to bring WhatsApp to KaiOS[1].

That was the most requested feature on JioPhone 1, when it was released & people were ready to put more money into next cheapest android smartphone to have it. Now, WhatsApp is available on both JioPhone1 & JioPhone2.

Obviously it is packaged standalone version of WhatsApp web. WhatsApp team has been very successful in bring consistent performance of their apps on all platforms they support, so I assume it works well.

[1]:https://blog.whatsapp.com/10000649/WhatsApp-for-JioPhone-on-...

Edit : typo

The "regular" WhatsApp web needs the app to run on your Android or iOS device - it merely establishes a tunnel to get everything from the phone.

The KaiOS version was built from scratch.

I stand corrected. WhatsApp web does communicate with phone to perform regular activities.

So the KaiOS version apart from sharing UI, might not have much common with the WhatsApp web. Then again, I wonder how much of the tech used for secure communication with the phone from WhatsApp web can be repurposed to make it a standalone application?

Very nice project. KaiOS also runs on jio phones and they are selling really well in India. Besides 4g these phones also have wifi support. Kai os phones are the only feature phones(I know of) that provide wifi capabilities.

By the way I've got a question for people who've used Kai OS / firefox os. To use google apps like youtube/ maps etc do you need to log in like in android?

You can use the Gapps you mentioned even on Android without logging in I think. At least on older Androids (4.x)

Yes. But on Android they are pre installed.... Not sure how it works ok Kai....

Just for information, as I do not know if this suits your use case: on my phone, LineageOS with no Play Services installed, I can watch YouTube using Firefox + the website. Maps 10.1 can be installed via Yalp Store and works pretty well.

Thank you!

For YouTube, you could also install NewPipe from FDroid. It works perfectly 99% of the time, until YouTube changes something in their page and they have to mod the parser.

No you don't have to be logged in. That provides you the same experience as when you're not be logged in from a web browser.

I can’t even imagine the environmental / labor horrors that must be involved to allow for a phone to cost $7 retail.

You make a very valid point. It can be easy to forget to consider environmental cost when we consider the cost of an item.

I hate smartphones with a passion, so just use an old dumbphone. I face a lot of pressure through work to have one though. I'm thinking that if I do eventually get forced back into smartphone ownership I'll opt for a Fairphone 2. Major benefits being the improved environmental consideration, the ability to run Lineage OS (so no Google), and the modular approach makes it easy to hack/repair. Main downside is that it is very expensive (to me anyway... I get that many people these days seem to think £1,000 is a reasonable sum for a Facebook/Instagram PDA!).

Other phones of the same caliber have the same horrors, you just pay an higher profit margin.

Wow, #1 on home! By the way, do you have any idea if Wiz/JioPhone/... are shipped by any seller to Europe? Would love to hack one of those

The article says it supports WhatsApp, but the KaiOS publication clarifies it does not. In many countries, that's a no go.

That's the reason Firefox OS was dead in the water. Telcos in Europe promised there would be a version of whatsapp for Firefox OS which never materialised. A mobile without whatsapp might as well be a brick.

Apparently, it's the second most common mobile phone OS in India[1] which sounds like it's not a «no go» for everyone.

Also the question is not really “does it support WhatsApp”, but “does WhatsApp support this OS”. Which may eventually be the case if there's enough market share for that.

[1] https://www.bgr.in/news/jiophone-kaios-surpasses-ios-india-s...

Whatsapp is only very big in __some__ countries actually.

Europe have free sms, so I do have friends with telegram, signal, skype, whatsapp, dumb phones, facebook chat, wire, etc., and at the the center of this crazy venn diagram, we can all discuss with sms for free. Most discussions are not group chats.

In Asia they have big whatsapp competitors like weechat. But I've seen kik used as well.

In Africa, it's also a lot of text message since they get the best coverage.

Whatsapp is definitly popular, but far from a universal.

It's also really popular in Australia (2nd most common after FB). Likely underrepresented in older people.

In Japan everyone uses LINE. In South Korea everyone uses KakaoTalk.

Probably worth mentioning GerdaOS (https://gerda.tech/), the first try to bring custom ROMs to KaiOS phones.

So if I'm understanding right, this isn't like LineageOS[0] for Android, which builds a system from the Android Open Source Project (AOSP)[1], but a "romhack", or modified system? Pity. I naïvely hope that running a fully open source system would be easier on a phone like this, since it's simpler than the latest and greatest in the smartphone world. Realistically, they probably still run the same radios which never have sources available.

[0] https://lineageos.org/ [1] https://source.android.com/

Why isn't something like that in EU offered/possible? I would like this

I saw an interesting YouTube video about KaiOS a while back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OA_g2bQgOXY

Any word on US availability? There are plenty of people who don’t need an entire iPhone, or can’t comprehend one due to age or other handicaps. It’s good to have choices.

Not sure about US but they are available to buy on amazon. It'll probably cost a lot more after shipping charges though...

You can buy a Nokia 8110 4G in the U.S.A. IIRC, and it's powered by KaiOS.

I tried a demo unit. It was a very disappointing experience. Hard to use, cheap colour screen was unpleasant to look at. I really wanted to like it, but couldn't.

Give me that phone with monochrome display, the usability of Nokia's original OS and modern network connectivity and I'd jump at it.

The 8110 4G isn't available with an appropriate set of radio bands for the US, so you're going to have coverage issues.

Just buy one of those feature phones with the giant keys and screen fonts.

There are two or three that I've found in the US (an older list is here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS#Devices). They mostly seem to have bad reviews, and they aren't cheap here compared to older Android phones.

I think your best bet is a cheaper feature phone, though most in stores are carrier-locked, so you may have to shop for an unlocked one online.

I don't understand why the Google Assistant has to be thrown in. Beside me not liking the idea of Google Assistant processing my request, I don't really believe that it's a feature that many need or even request.

Of cause I'm in a non-English speaking country, so that may change the usage, but I don't know anyone who uses Google Assistant, Siri or Cortana and only two people who use Alexa, which technically isn't even available here.

I use it regularly to search for things because it's often faster than typing, and that's on a smartphone with a swipe keyboard. Compared to T9, it must be even better.

Exactly this. T9 input is difficult for most people, but especially for the customer base of the Jio phones: a lot of the people who buy these phones are looking for content in languages they aren't necessarily fluent in, and some are even semi-literate in their native language. Being able to send a text message, make a call, or search for a popular video via voice input is a huge boon for those users.

Google assistant is the reason the phone is so cheap. The same reason a smart TV is cheaper than a dumb one, and why most of those "home assistant" things are cheap. You're not paying with money, you're paying by allowing access for data harvesting.

The same phone without Google Assistant would be better, sure. But it'd also be much more expensive - if it was allowed to exist at all.

I couldn't understand why they were subsidising the phone, I googled a bit and found this article saying the original article is a lie:

https://beebom.com/fact-check-google-wizphone-indonesia/

I am Indonesian. Its been 4 months since they announced the phone on December, and they are still not available anywhere. I am not sure whats the hold up but there is no other update

Does anyone know if there are plans of these phones selling in the US? This one-thousand dollar madness of smartphone need to be stopped.

This is useful. Are they on Amazon or eBay yet? A backup phone for when you don't want to lug around a mini-tablet is useful.

How I wish these cheap 4G SoC kits could be sourced easily like the ESP8266 or the Raspberry Pi.

A closed-source Google-developed OS for feature phones. Obviously it's the best spend DoD money so far. Just 20 millions. You need to track poor people too.

If DoD wanted to track people they can just do it by triangulating the cellular signal. No need for a smartphone.

If you want transcriptions, proximity indication, scanning wireless networks, expanding your geodesic grid to accurately locate dumbphones etc, you need custom software. This is what this is (mostly) about. Sure we can pretend it's about "harmless" data mining but there's no such thing.

> You need to track poor people too

Bingo. That's is what it all about. Free email, free cloud docs and photos, free browser, free web tools. KaiOS should be running Google code. Replace DoD with Google (Skynet from Terminator) though.

KaiOS is not a google-developed OS. kaiostech is its own company with offices in several countries. Google gave them financing but it isn't fair to them to paint them as some sort of vassal - Google funds lots of things.

I'd buy a few of these for my kids.

Kids will tell you years later that it was wrong giving their data to Google, an Ad company, with core business of monetizing people's data.

In the 2 years they use this phone what value is there possibly to be gained??? It's virtually zero value to anyone.

They'll keep their Google accounts, because of emails and logins on other sites, and use them on their next devices, keeping data flowing and attributed.

Hell. They would even browse Internet using Chrome signed in to their G accounts, giving away browsing history (all their secret dreams, interests that even closest people don't know about)

Users on these phones generally don't have google accounts. Of course some kinds of Assistant commands won't work without such an account, e.g. scheduling appointments in your google calendar.

And these phones don't run Chrome at all.

I don't see why. I wasn't using my data for anything so it seems like a win-win if someone will pay for it. Also, NB this phone runs KaiOS, not Android.

KaiOS "now sport official Google Assistant" .. "same OS just received over $20m funding from Google and even partnered with them"

Its the code that runs 24/7 what matters, Android or a few G services is of no difference.

> I wasn't using my data for anything

Browsing, location, contacts, photos of friends, calendar, emails... the lot. Goal is your full psychological profile, skills, circles, reactions, job positions. From as much data as possible. Uses today are simple ad targeting, maybe 3rd party screening checks. Tomorrow?

I have no kids myself, but from friends who do have kids I hear they get teased (and sometimes bullied) if they don't have a half decent smartphone. And some of these friends are living in poorer ('non western') countries even. I guess my friends are not lying, but not sure how widespread that is.

Kids get made fun of for whatever nonsense is available as ammunition. I've never seen kids get laughed at over phones though.

>...I hear they get teased (and sometimes bullied) if they don't have a half decent smartphone.

I've also heard of kids getting left out of things socially for the same reason. One family tried the "you don't need a smart phone until sometime in high school" thing, but their kid started missing invitations to everything because the plans developed on whatsapp, snapchat, or Facebook - all of which the kid didn't have real-time access to.

They relented and got their middle school kid a smartphone.

Way too much of the social world of students goes through phones to be able to keep up without a smart phone.

> from friends who do have kids I hear they get teased (and sometimes bullied) if they don't have a half decent smartphone

My daughter is in middle school, and pretty much everyone in her class has iPhone. Only a few have an Android phone.

School requires every student to have a Chromebook, but even teachers encourage students to use smartphones. Also, one of the apps only works on smartphones.

My daughter has my old Samsung 6s. She doesn't complain or ask for a new phone, but I know she wants an iPhone.

> School requires every student to have a Chromebook

And a mandatory Google account for tracking your kids. I'd change the school.

or change something about said chromebook :)

WebAssembly is going to make Linux phones rock. Can't wait.

The Web makes the underlying OS irrelevant.

I think that may be the point

Running the Linux kernel would just be a pyrrhic victory, as it already happens on Android and ChromeOS.

Any OEM would eventually just replace it for something else, preferably non copyleft.

How do I get one?

Are you in the West? Usually these types of phones appear on ebay or gearbest, etc after some time, for a somewhat higher price

Another instance of google propping up puppet competitors.

I have to say, living in Indonesia and seeing the start up scene (and financiers recently not to long ago at Global Venture Summit[which included a big ad from a google presenter, as well as one of their VC firm spawn]), seems like google is share cropping startups into their whole ecosystem.

But who can blame em? The government wants the USD flowing in, and the companies (already strapped for talent and cash to pay for such) get their IaaS for free for decent chunk of time… virtually no push back here like there is in the states to 'some' degree… and it keeps their offices from getting raided again!

How difficult would this be to add GIPO to?

This crushes the Raspi3 for the value.

Yes you are correct. These phones range anything from 300-700 MB of ram and have a pretty decent hardware. Combine that with a user operable interface (physical buttons, screen, audio) and you've got a nice package.

I was looking a bit into this. It seems that KAI os is not an opensource project. Plus the OS is flashed into the ROM of these phones so its also very difficult to install a new OS reliably. So even if you got the GIPO to work with the phone how would you actually program it? Kai OS has a device api [1] but as far as I can tell it does not give you access to linux shell.

If the phone has a usb slot you can use a usb gipo board [2]

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

[2]https://numato.com/product/8-channel-usb-gpio-module-with-an...

Thoughts, since this is a real life issue/question I'm making a decision on-

>I'm quite surprised at the cost of a USB GIPO board. I suppose I shouldnt have been.

>Developing an OS for a platform that could change at anytime, seems risky/time consuming.

>novel ways of communication- Put everything on wifi relays, or communication with other peripherals

Might be worth buying one of these phones and taking it apart to see whats inside.

EDIT: Looking to select my microprocessor for a consumer product. An entire computer would be nice.

You do have different leverage producing a volume product. Maybe there's a chance the manufacturer would be willing to cooperate?

Os'es have been built. You don't need to spend time in that. You'll find one as small as a few hundred kbs to as big as 10s of gbs. For all kind of architectures and all opnsource. However you need to find a way to install the os on compatible device. This is no easy task and will require you to flash ROM. For every device.......

Or find a device that supports booting from an sd card. I don't think there is any phone out there that supports that. There are not even that many laptops that can boot from an sd card slot. But they can from an sd to usb adapter...

>novel ways of communication- Put everything on wifi relays, or communication with other peripherals

HIGH FIVE!!!!!

This is a very good idea. But then again how will GIPO attached devices send wifi signals and understand incoming wifi signals? You'll need a separate chip for that (If I understand correctly) that would have radios and antennas. I'm sure you can find a cheap way to build such a device using electronic components that you can find online.

A wifi enabled usb is very very cheap. wifi usb cards would be even cheaper, I think. A mobile phone like this is a complete package for about $10-$15.

+ screen, GPS and modem, it seems fantastic. Even without GPIO, USB solution or bluetooth + some nrf chip could do.

In practice though, unless you plan to deploy a lot of them, as a hobbyist, your time is likely more valuable than any hardware so it seems reasonable to just go with the most popular platform.

One "GPIO" could be the vibration motor stuff, another the audio out ... but it's probably not worth it.

We did exactly that four years ago with JanOS (http://janos.io/), it turned (Firefox OS) mobile phone motherboards into IoT devices. You could also control some GPIO, see http://blog.telenor.io/gonzo/hardware/2015/02/10/gpio.html for an example of remapping the volume buttons to control a new LED. Unfortunately we couldn't find a single OEM that wanted to sell the motherboards if they weren't going in a mobile phone, and ODM's didn't want to work with us either if we wouldn't build phones.

Just looked at the website. Very cool project. Are you still mainatining jan os?

No. It’s been defunct since Firefox OS died.

It will probably require a plan. Walmart tried selling a $10 prepaid smart phone and they were all bought up by tinkerers. A $10 phone means lots of hobby and maybe even some commercial projects get a cell phone mounted as a touchscreen interface.

Actually it does not. $7 in India (or i.e. my home country, or some other relatively poor countries) is not the same as $7 in US. Plus, these phones don't have a touch screen and are much cheaper to make than the Walmart Android phones.

How is that a problem?

Because they were sold as loss leaders on the assumption that people would be paying for time/data on the network.

I don’t think this phone is being sold as a loss leader, though.

I wouldn't be so sure, though it seems more like a Amazon-type play than an ISP pushing plans:

"Customers can get a WizPhone WP006 from vending machines at more than 10,000 Alfamart stores for just USD$7 (IDR99,000)1. Then, with the built-in AllWizapp, customers can unlock shopping benefits in Alfamart by scanning barcodes on each product and making their purchase directly via the app on their WizPhone."

In Indonesia, phone plans is not popular. Heck, I can probably say 80% use prepaid. Prepaid is easier to get, cheaper, doesn't require verification (in practice), and promotions heavily favor new SIM cards (so it's very common for people to change number since it's cheaper to get new one vs maintaining it).

source: I'm Indonesian (but I use postpaid).

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