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.
KaiOS – A Smartphone Operating System
21–30 of 165 posts
Re: KaiOS – A Smartphone Operating System
#22I'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.
Windows Phone is discontinued, but sure as heck wasn't experimental. I've used it flawlessly since about 2011 with rock-solid stability and battery life.
Re: KaiOS – A Smartphone Operating System
#23I'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 device…
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Re: KaiOS – A Smartphone Operating System
#24I'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.
I remember. There was excellent Nokia hardware and shit software. The only way to get access to proper APIs that the other 2 platforms had was to become a Microsoft partner. The blame for that debacle rests entirely with Microsoft. They had lots to say, but not an ounce of willpower to back it up.
Re: KaiOS – A Smartphone Operating System
#25Let'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 archit…
That's not even remotely true. We are seeing significant, growing app development on the "hybrid" stack at Ionic, and strong interest in Progressive Web Apps.
Re: KaiOS – A Smartphone Operating System
#26Let'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 archit…
That's not even remotely true. We are seeing significant, growing app development on the "hybrid" stack at Ionic, and strong interest in Progressive Web Apps.
How many of top 20 apps in App Store are web apps?
I agree that web apps are faster to iterate but the user experience is guaranteed to be worse.
I've worked on some of the web apps that are usually featured as "see web can do this". I'm not an outsider. I'm just observing how any app that is successful is either native already or they are making it native asap
Re: KaiOS – A Smartphone Operating System
#27I'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.
HMD uses Android for smartphones.
KaiOS is for feature phones only. It has to run just few basic apps. It's not a platform for Nokia.
Funny fact: Nokia sold 75 million phones last year. Only little over 4 million of those were smartphones.
Re: KaiOS – A Smartphone Operating System
#28I'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.
I remember. There was excellent Nokia hardware and shit software. The only way to get access to proper APIs that the other 2 platforms had was to become a Microsoft partner. The blame for that debacle rests entirely with Microsoft. They had lots to say, but not an ounce of willpower to back it up.
to be fair, by "shit" I mean boring or uninteresting. The core components were lean and performant, no complaints there. However, it was near impossible to make new/exciting/relevant software for the WP platform if you didn't have their blessing to do so. It was a grave sin imo. An underdog mobile OS needs all the talent it can get; they sabotaged themselves.
Re: KaiOS – A Smartphone Operating System
#29Let'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 archit…
That's not even remotely true. We are seeing significant, growing app development on the "hybrid" stack at Ionic, and strong interest in Progressive Web Apps.
Mainly due to the average consumer not being interested in installing an app for something like LetGo or OfferUp (Craigslist competitors). Even Facebook works well in a mobile browser, with push notifications even!
Re: KaiOS – A Smartphone Operating System
#30I'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 device…
WebOS was open sourced years ago. And a community even ported it to the Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 7, to the point that I believe there was even the ability to make phone calls. But it never got any momentum and the community seems to have fizzled out.