181–190 of 212 posts
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Firefox OS was doomed to fail. They created an operating system which used the slowest rendering and JS engine there was and put it in the worst hardware they could find.
These phones run on the same rendering and JS engine... "KaiOS apps are based on web technologies–HTML, CSS, and JavaScript–and are run by Gecko runtime." https://developer.kaiostech.com/
The article says it supports WhatsApp, but the KaiOS publication clarifies it does not. In many countries, that's a no go.
Whatsapp is only very big in __some__ countries actually. Europe have free sms, so I do have friends with telegram, signal, skype, whatsapp, dumb phones, facebook chat, wire, etc., and at the the center of this crazy venn diagram, we can all discuss with sms for free. Most discussions are not group chats. In Asia they have big whatsapp competitors like weechat. But I've seen kik used as well. In Africa, it's also a l…
JioPhone, which runs on KaiOS has managed to bring WhatsApp to KaiOS[1]. That was the most requested feature on JioPhone 1, when it was released & people were ready to put more money into next cheapest android smartphone to have it. Now, WhatsApp is available on both JioPhone1 & JioPhone2. Obviously it is packaged standalone version of WhatsApp web. WhatsApp team has been very successful in bring consistent performan…
The "regular" WhatsApp web needs the app to run on your Android or iOS device - it merely establishes a tunnel to get everything from the phone. The KaiOS version was built from scratch.
So the KaiOS version apart from sharing UI, might not have much common with the WhatsApp web. Then again, I wonder how much of the tech used for secure communication with the phone from WhatsApp web can be repurposed to make it a standalone application?
Any word on US availability? There are plenty of people who don’t need an entire iPhone, or can’t comprehend one due to age or other handicaps. It’s good to have choices.
I think your best bet is a cheaper feature phone, though most in stores are carrier-locked, so you may have to shop for an unlocked one online.
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The desktop has been replaced by laptops and 2-1 foldables, it won't die that easily, specially since Android apps on tablets and 2-1 keep beinging maximized phone apps.
> The desktop has been replaced by laptops and 2-1 foldables Whoa, let's not get ahead of ourselves. Pholdables are not even being sold yet, let alone "replacing the desktop".
They certainly are pretty nice... writing this from an HP Specter x360 ;)
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Android Linux is quite different from upstream Linux, specially after Project Treble. Now it looks more like a pseudo-mikrokernel, with drivers running on their own processes, talking via Android IPC with the kernel layer. Also it has a much more security knobs turned on as mainline, and many features trimmed down that are irrelevant to Android userspace.
Treble is just another layer of abstraction on top of HALs and more binder use. Android HALs don't replace kernel drivers and so it's still the same distance from mikrokernel as it ever was, and neither did Treble further the split from mainline Linux. If anything, Android 8 reduced the gap to mainline with switching e.g. to DRM synchronization fences.
> Binderized HALs. HALs expressed in HAL interface definition language (HIDL). These HALs replace both conventional and legacy HALs used in earlier versions of Android. In a Binderized HAL, the Android framework and HALs communicate with each other using binder inter-process communication (IPC) calls. All devices launching with Android 8.0 or later must support binderized HALs only.
>
> Passthrough HALs. A HIDL-wrapped conventional or legacy HAL. These HALs wrap existing HALs and can serve the HAL in binderized and same-process (passthrough) modes. Devices upgrading to Android 8.0 can use passthrough HALs.
> All other HALs provided by the vendor image can be in passthrough OR binderized mode. In a fully Treble-compliant device, all of these must be binderized.
> Legacy HALs (also deprecated in Android 8.0) are interfaces that predate conventional HALs. A few important subsystems (Wi-Fi, Radio Interface Layer, and Bluetooth) are legacy HALs. While there's no uniform or standardized way to describe a legacy HAL, anything predating Android 8.0 that is not a conventional HAL is a legacy HAL. Parts of some legacy HALs are contained in libhardware_legacy, while other parts are interspersed throughout the codebase.
https://source.android.com/devices/architecture/hal-types
A binderized HAL driver only requires a minimal kernel surface, if anything.
Furthermore, I specifically stated pseudo on my description.
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The desktop has been replaced by laptops and 2-1 foldables, it won't die that easily, specially since Android apps on tablets and 2-1 keep beinging maximized phone apps.
> The desktop has been replaced by laptops and 2-1 foldables Whoa, let's not get ahead of ourselves. Pholdables are not even being sold yet, let alone "replacing the desktop".
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An idea that was already being explored on Symbian with their WebRuntime actually. https://web.archive.org/web/20100603124720/http://www.forum....
I feel like the whole Symbian ecosystem disappeared, it's a shame nobody is preserving any of the software, that was 10+ years of tech that is basically gone.
All what is left seems to be Web Archive and these sites.
Having spent a couple of years building apps for KaiOS (which is really Firefox OS), I can say that it's probably the easiest development platform out there - mostly pure web; with some proprietary extensions. I wish Firefox OS hadn't thrown in the towel so early. These devices are selling millions of units every month.
Thats news to me. I read that KaiOS was built from the ground up & not derived from anything.
> Firefox OS hadn't thrown in the towel so early
That was a rather quite event and I was surprised to see no much discussion around it. An OS by Mozilla can be more trusted than an OS by Google. Why did Mozilla kill the project?