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KaiOS – A Smartphone Operating System

kaiostech.com

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Re: KaiOS – A Smartphone Operating System

#81

Post by cwyers »

beeflaw wrote: post #58
cwyers wrote: post #49

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 a…

How do you define success? This is not a competitor to iOS/Android, it's for cheap low-end devices, which is still a sizable market. Try running Android on 256MB of RAM...

Success: Enough market share to build a sustainable business so that it doesn't go away at some point.

And I know about Android's problems there (and mentioned it). But Windows Phone and FirefoxOS both chased those markets and they're both basically gone now.

Re: KaiOS – A Smartphone Operating System

#82

Post by squarefoot »

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.

Re: KaiOS – A Smartphone Operating System

#83

Post by k_sze »

TickleSteve wrote: post #69
blitmap wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as someone not at all involved in this space, I'd love for Google to take smartphones waaaay more seriously. I feel like in an effort to make Android easy to adopt and customize they have let the "feel" of Android suffer. I hate bloatware on every new phone. I hate that phones differ so greatly. Something invaluable to me on an iPhone is the switch to silence alerts. I wish Google would define a "standard" l…

That's exactly what the Android One (and previously Android Go) standards where all about, they set minimum hardware standards and experiences. They then guarantee updates for two years, etc...

Guaranteeing updates for X years is an empty promise unless they also guarantee the maximum delay in adopting upstream (security) updates and releasing them, with reimbursement in case of failure to comply.

Re: KaiOS – A Smartphone Operating System

#84

Post by mamcx »

yesimahuman wrote: post #25
msoad wrote: post #2

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 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.

> growing app development on the "hybrid" stack at Ionic

That is not the metric. Is fast-UI, not how many devs are lazy or don't know how do native.

I invest more than 2 months researching the space this year (after several other times before), and seriously, only iOS is fast enough for html/webview.

Android is SUPER slow. I mean, i get your ionic sample app and run it on my test device. I touch once... and wait a century (sarcasm) for it to respond..

Re: KaiOS – A Smartphone Operating System

#85

Post by yesimahuman »

mamcx wrote: post #84
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.

> growing app development on the "hybrid" stack at Ionic That is not the metric. Is fast-UI, not how many devs are lazy or don't know how do native. I invest more than 2 months researching the space this year (after several other times before), and seriously, only iOS is fast enough for html/webview. Android is SUPER slow. I mean, i get your ionic sample app and run it on my test device. I touch once... and wait a ce…

That’s a gross exaggeration re: Android touch delay. You are correct though, Android is not as performant as iOS in nearly every category, including JS/web. And no, raw UI perf isn’t the metric for most of the market. Many teams are successful with the stack and deciding to use it, considering it to have perfectly acceptable performance for their needs considering the benefits of using the web stack (as we can attest to working with many hundreds of thousands of developers using Ionic), hence it not being a “failure.” With PWAs emerging, expect the growth of the web on mobile to heat up.

Re: KaiOS – A Smartphone Operating System

#86

Post by Eridrus »

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...

Re: KaiOS – A Smartphone Operating System

#87

Post by jrcii »

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…

Look into the Neo900 and the DragonBox Pyra

Re: KaiOS – A Smartphone Operating System

#88

Post by devit »

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…

What they lacked is support for Android apps, since obviously expecting everyone to rewrite all apps for a new platform is a non-starter.

If Mozilla had simply acquired LineageOS, worked on MicroG to reach feature parity with Play Services, added Firefox for Android and their own app store in addition to Google Play via MicroG, and resold flagship Android phones with that as well as offering it to OEMs, they would have had significant success at very little cost.

In fact, they still could do that.

Re: KaiOS – A Smartphone Operating System

#89

Post by culot »

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…

Apparently KaiOS is a fork of Firefox OS/B2G. So... where's the code, yo? I've scoured Github, but no sign of it.

edit: nevermind:

"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."

So that's a no on giving back to the B2G which born thee. Nice. Another closed-source OS is just what the mobile space needs.

Re: KaiOS – A Smartphone Operating System

#90

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]
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