I have a Nokia 6300 4G, it works fine for what I want: A small dual SIM phone with good call quality and a 4G router when away from home. Any apps are a bonus though Meta recently withdrew the WhatsApp one.
How can a FOSS project based around Linux and Firefox be picked up and closed? That ought to be impossible -- this isn't BSD-licensed stuff.
The front-end part of FxOS was always under an Apache 2 license, much to the dismay of some employees, but that was forced by commercial partners to allow them to differentiate while keeping their changes private.
I had a terrible experience, nothing worked correctly, basic, fundamental apps such as phone, contact, alarms, had lag spikes of over a second for any action and randomly crashed, it had no CJK support (kind of a big deal for me, and like 20% of the world)...
Some apps worked remarkably well, but having Youtube work better than messages is kind of pointless given the sVGA screen size. And the app ecosystem was basically dead. I tried developing a bit for it (apps are a simple html+css+js package), but at the time publishing to their app store required integration of their advertising solution, which absolutely sucked (in 6 month of use, I was never served any other ad than "hot MILFs in my area"), which meant that neither commercial nor OSS apps would target the platfom. IIRC side-loading sort-of worked depending on phones, which means it doesn't work for the average user.
Oh and sometimes the Kai Store app would send advertisement through push notifications.
I loved KaiOS on paper, but using it was a chore. A 2010-era "dumb" phone could do most of what a KaiOS phone can, but better, except for connecting to 3g/4g networks, and older networks are deprecated in many regions, which means they're not an option anymore.
Maybe they got better over time, but what a huge disappointment that was.
> This branch is 400945 commits ahead of, 15894 commits behind mozilla-b2g/gecko-b2g:b2g48_v2_6
and it seems they're still using bugzilla, so they're obviously hard-core
Here are the list of their 74 supported devices https://www.kaiostech.com/explore/devices/
Browser, phone, email/contacts, maps, payment, authentication, file manager, networking (NFC, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, cellular).
Seems like with the progression of web APIs and WASM, most of this functionality can live in the browser.
They're honestly pretty horrible. Everything is just so much effort on them. Nothing makes sense. And I'm no dummy. I worked for Nokia for a while on prototypes in the mid-2000s, which is the kind of era these Kai phones hark back to.