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KaiOS – A Smartphone Operating System

kaiostech.com

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Re: KaiOS – A Smartphone Operating System

#31

Post by ocdtrekkie »

fabrice_d wrote: post #18
msoad wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have seen how WebOS and FirefoxOS turned out. Wishing Google good luck with PWAs on slow devices. Having seen Inbox web app animations and memory usage I'm not holding my breath

Open secret: FirefoxOS "failed" because it could not get a few super popular services in the targeted markets to write apps for it. It's very hard to break the chicken and egg issue without that support when bootstrapping a new mobile OS.

This is what I truly hope PWAs can solve. If they are 'good enough', they will bridge the gap for new platforms until they're popular enough for companies to develop for directly.

Re: KaiOS – A Smartphone Operating System

#32

Post by abrowne »

jpalomaki wrote: post #4

Looks like the new HMD-Nokia "banana" is powered by KaiOS [1]. [1] https://www.nokia.com/en_int/phones/nokia-8110-4g

The KaiOS page also says they launched phones in 2017 with AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile. It looks like this is T-Mo's: https://www.t-mobile.com/cell-phone/alcatel-go-flip

Re: KaiOS – A Smartphone Operating System

#33

Post by cmrdporcupine »

awesomepeter wrote: post #14
msoad wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have seen how WebOS and FirefoxOS turned out. Wishing Google good luck with PWAs on slow devices. Having seen Inbox web app animations and memory usage I'm not holding my breath

Did you actually use WebOS? I've had a great experience with the Palm Pre phones, way ahead of its time.

I was a big WebOS advocate, and loved it very much. Owned 3 Pre series phones.

But you do have to admit that UI latency on it was quite high compared to iOS. I mean, so was Android back then, but they improved it significantly.

Re: KaiOS – A Smartphone Operating System

#34

Post by yesimahuman »

msoad wrote: post #26
yesimahuman wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

At the risk of sounding flippant, what the top 20 consumer apps in the app store use and what the rest of the market use are very different things, especially when factoring in the enterprise. I say that as someone building a business and making money from these customers.

At any rate, we have a number of well know brand flagship apps built on Ionic, though they might not have usage patterns like Facebook/Snapchat. By far the most mobile development happening right now is outside of the well known consumer social app space.

Re: KaiOS – A Smartphone Operating System

#35

Post by acabal »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #30
djsumdog wrote: post #11

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 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.

Man, WebOS was truly excellent. I had a Palm Pre back in the day and to this day there are moments when I'm using Android and I wish I was using WebOS instead. It had such a natural interface for multitasking too.

Unrelated to WebOS, but the Pre's wireless charging accessory is IMHO still the best to date.

Re: KaiOS – A Smartphone Operating System

#36

Post by zokier »

djsumdog wrote: post #11

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 device…

> It's really preventing the way Linux took off on developers desktops back in the late 90s/early 2000s.

It is somewhat ironical that the Wintel monopoly that standardized so much of PC space ultimately ended up helping Linux desktops, despite the grumblings of UNIX greybeards.

Re: KaiOS – A Smartphone Operating System

#37

Post by Jhsto »

throwaway7645 wrote: post #22
Jhsto wrote: post #13

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.

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.

What I meant was that I don't follow why does Nokia rock the boat with their choices of operating systems. They already have their own software running on the likes of the renowned 3310, so why not spend the engineering time to extend that instead of risking another platform becoming discontinued? That's what I would want to hear more about.

Re: KaiOS – A Smartphone Operating System

#38

Post by cmrdporcupine »

acabal wrote: post #35
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Man, WebOS was truly excellent. I had a Palm Pre back in the day and to this day there are moments when I'm using Android and I wish I was using WebOS instead. It had such a natural interface for multitasking too. Unrelated to WebOS, but the Pre's wireless charging accessory is IMHO still the best to date.

IMHO a large part of WebOS's excellence was the UX design work of Matias Duarte. Android improved immeasurably once he came to Google.

Re: KaiOS – A Smartphone Operating System

#39

Post by RandallBrown »

acabal wrote: post #35
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Man, WebOS was truly excellent. I had a Palm Pre back in the day and to this day there are moments when I'm using Android and I wish I was using WebOS instead. It had such a natural interface for multitasking too. Unrelated to WebOS, but the Pre's wireless charging accessory is IMHO still the best to date.

The multitasking interface from webOS is very similar to what iOS has now.

Re: KaiOS – A Smartphone Operating System

#40

Post by bri3d »

djsumdog wrote: post #11

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 device…

I agree, open hardware and specifically the awful state of radio chipsets is the biggest issue here. We're at least getting close to some working open-source SoC hardware with all the work on Mali and Sunxi/Allwinner reverse engineering efforts, but there's nothing good going in the baseband space and the standards and certification are so complex and expensive that it's a complete lock-in.
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