from Hacker News

KaiOS – A Smartphone Operating System

by fstephany on 2/25/18, 8:32 PM with 160 comments

• by garganshum on 2/26/18, 2:39 AM

  I have actually developed for this platform. KaiOS powers Jio Phone and Reliance JIO is by far their largest customer (and also an investor from what I know).

  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.

• by Eridrus on 2/26/18, 12:31 AM

  It seems like folks aren't aware that KaiOS is that runs on the JioPhone, a super cheap & popular feature phone in India, bundled with a super cheap data plan:

  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...

• by jpalomaki on 2/25/18, 9:07 PM

  Looks like the new HMD-Nokia "banana" is powered by KaiOS [1].

  [1] https://www.nokia.com/en_int/phones/nokia-8110-4g

• by squarefoot on 2/26/18, 12:06 AM

  A chromatic nightmare paired with zero information, and that zero is stretched to fit a multi...thing I can't scroll properly. I sincerely hope whoever made that website isn't involved with the operating system. Please give us back the web made by people for people, not these abominations made by designers for investors.

• by msoad on 2/25/18, 8:52 PM

  Let's face it, web on mobile has failed.

  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

• by shams93 on 2/25/18, 9:39 PM

  To me the mistake that was made with Firefox os was going after android instead of going after chromebooks. If firefox os had been designed to run on commodity x86 hardware like chromium os it would not have fallen so hard because a lot of people would be able to run it on an old laptop even if no one was making official hardware for it. Because these run html5 web apps the lack of appstore depth would have been a non-issue as well.

• by protomyth on 2/25/18, 9:16 PM

  From the FAQ

  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.

• by sandov on 2/26/18, 1:52 AM

  I couldn't find a link to the source code. Then I found this:

  >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.

• by Jhsto on 2/25/18, 9:23 PM

  I'm on a high horse (I'm able to afford an iPhone), but what kind of problem does this solve? To me, it looks like Nokia now has Android, their own operating system, and this to upkeep. Does anyone else remember what happened when they last time partnered with an experimental mobile operating system? I think it was Microsoft last time.

  Would love to hear some reasoning from the folks from HMD about this.

• by tty7 on 2/25/18, 11:45 PM

  This website is terrible for providing information

• by yosito on 2/25/18, 11:18 PM

  This is definitely a promising OS. The fact that they have a maps app is extremely important. I think they'll also need a WhatsApp app to be truly competitive. They could use a few other mainstream messaging apps too. The mbasic Facebook messenger should work fine on this OS.

• by l1ambda on 2/25/18, 9:04 PM

  I'd like to see https://www.redox-os.org/ ported to mobile phones and perhaps integrated with this or FirefoxOS somehow.

• by JD557 on 2/26/18, 10:29 AM

  From the website, it appears that all apps are written in HTML5+CSS+JS, however they target feature phones with 256MB of RAM and claim to have a long battery life.

  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?

• by danbolt on 2/25/18, 9:22 PM

  Even if I had to tune for low-end hardware, I’d love to own and hack around on a simple device with this sort of OS.

• by cwyers on 2/25/18, 10:45 PM

  Competing with the Android/iOS duopoly was a war of attrition the Microsoft, Firefox, Canonical and Samsung (Tizen) all lost. If you don't have the resources that those companies do I have a hard time seeing how you survive, and I have no interest in investing in a platform that has an extremely high risk of being orphaned. I wish it was otherwise - earlier today I was lamenting that my Samsung Galaxy S7 is laggier and less responsive than the $100 unlocked Lumia I bought myself years ago was. But I don't see another platform succeeding here.

• by di1eep on 2/25/18, 10:41 PM

  This is actually based off the Mozilla project - 'boot to gecko'

• by chicob on 2/26/18, 1:14 PM

  I hope "discoverability" doesn't mean "easily trackable".

• by erikb on 2/25/18, 10:54 PM

  It seems to offer less than the average Android or iOS? Why should I use it?

• by magicfractal on 2/25/18, 9:11 PM

  Can I install it on a phone?

• by abrowne on 2/25/18, 11:18 PM

  Nice: it looks like the system font — for the Alcatel Go Flip and Nokia 8110 4G at least — is Open Sans. I've been using Source Sans Pro for most things lately, but I did always like Open Sans.

• by gsnedders on 2/26/18, 10:26 AM

  What version of Gecko is it based on, and what's the story with security patches from upstream?

• by djsumdog on 2/25/18, 9:19 PM

  I'd really like to see a truly open alternative on the mobile space. The biggest issue is the hardware. It's just not standardized and there's no incentive to do so. It's really preventing the way Linux took off on developers desktops back in the late 90s/early 2000s.

  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.

• by nkkollaw on 2/25/18, 10:38 PM

  I don't know. I really liked Microsoft's phones, but there was no Google Maps, no Google Inbox, and bunch of other apps that I use daily were missing.

  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.