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.
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.
That being said, I'm trying to get us to open source the "base" version which is provided to OEMs.
Which is funny because Mozilla tried that shortly before abandoning the whole project.
I wish Google would define a "standard" like Intel has with what is and what isn't an "Ultrabook". As in, to be a "Nexus" phone it must have a minimum resolution of ..., it must last for x hours of video playback and x hours of wifi use, it must have the damn alert-killing side switch, it must have a camera of a minimum quality (megapixel/zoom/can record at 1080p@60hz), etc...
Google should be defining what an Android phone is in terms of hardware; define a brand other makers can adopt so customers can trust the standard to at least cater to those needs. And that isn't even getting into how fucking awful the Google Play store is. What a malware magnet.
Sorry this is somewhat off-topic, I just feel this is how Google has lost us and why we seek alternatives.
Famous quote: "quantity has a quality all its own".
OnePlus's phones have that, and it's great. Of course, OnePlus also have some nasty privacy failures … but then, Apple have some nasty openness failures.
I'd love to be able to just buy a decent phone, with a replaceable battery (because the batteries fail first), which I, not some vendor, own.
It's about as responsive as my Pixel (i.e. not very responsive, not even close to iPhone) and it's a great size.
The problem is, as always, the battery. If I could replace that and install PostMarket, I might use it as my daily driver.
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.
In contrast, there is no obvious need to move away from Android, and if you don't like it, you can move to the iPhone. The Mac was not a good alternative 15 years ago.
Unrelated to WebOS, but the Pre's wireless charging accessory is IMHO still the best to date.
But really, hardware is not a problem from a marketing point of view, from a competition point of view. You can make FxOS to run on the best hardware with supported drivers, but the ecosystem is so behind, eventually users would move away from it. That was the real problem. Consequently, developers would likely give up on FxOS.
Samsung's are all based on Android - which tops iOS's market share by nearly 70%. Neither Ubuntu Touch nor FxOS had any real chances.
If IBM could have chosen a free and open DOS for its first PCs, the market would look very different today.
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.
So, while Samsung may ship Tizen and Windows Phone, they may not build phones for Amazon (which caused Amazon a lot of problems back in the day - where will you find a company making portable electronics that will make them a white-label product and not making android phones).
2. MicroG depends on Google's servers, so Google can pull the carpet out of them at any time. And where will you get those millions of apps if Google doesn't let you access the App store? Look at the difficulty Amazon has at getting apps into its store, and it's a larger company willing to pay devs to switch apps to Amazon store. And all the hacks that people use will be closed by Google once they get popular.
Now sure, you can use MicroG as a porting library (so if I have a closed source app relying on firebase I can trivially switch to relying on MicroG and Mozilla's back end - kind of like wine), but you'll still have to recreate all of Google's apps anyways (there's no way Google will publish their apps on an Android fork) and also those apps written by those who don't care to port (unlike wine - where I can use the OEM CD or EXE from the OEM website, there's no official way to get apks out of Play Store)
Why would they need to acquire LineageOS when they can just fork it for free?
>worked on MicroG to reach feature parity with Play Services
That would have been a TOS violation and would have been instantly shut down by Google.
>their own app store
You can't really compete with the Play store and developers wouldn't bother with it.
>they would have had significant success at very little cost.
No they wouldn't have. It would have reached the same outcome as their Android based FireFox OS did and even faster due to the TOS violations your suggesting.
I know the person behind this, but not sure of the status
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
The issue with web UIs in general is that it's still too hard to get optimal performance (eg. make sure you leverage the GPU as much as possible, don't force reflows, etc.). That could be solved by better tooling but we're not there yet.
Just watch a few Google I/O tracks, and there is always the future of mobile apps is Android on the Android tracks, while the Chrome/Web tracks are pushing for the future of mobile apps is Web, with an occasional jab at native devs, as if on the room next door they weren't talking about native development.
Then to make it even better, now we have Flutter as the third track.
While PWAs are slowly being adopted by everyone else, Google is the company pushing them.
They even have a Web Site just for PWAs, https://developers.google.com/web/progressive-web-apps/, so yeah politics.
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
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..
This definitely isn't true. The web is very much alive and flourishing on mobile.
Using web technologies for _everything_ on the phone however, is a mistake. That is not good.
Just today I had to kill Chrome on my device for the WebGL demo that was posted earlier. Yet it does OpenGL 3.x just without sweating.
I find it hard to believe that manual entering of phone numbers is common use case. Nowadays people mainly communicate by texting/chatting via social networks, right?
I am however guessing that a smaller screen will lead to longer battery life and the phone seems to aim itself at markets where that matters more than in the west.
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.
Speculating, but it's easy to see how Mozilla going after enterprise customers would have attracted a lot of bad press. FFOS was already carrying enough bad mojo, attaching "enterprise" to it would have been even worse.
For good or ill, Mozilla is supposed to be different from other corporations, at least in theory.
* The foundation was bleeding money and had to limit it's focus
* The Matchstick on KickStarter made FireFox OS look like a non-viable product
* Not a lot of chimerical interest outside from outside the community
The firefox OS website tried to divide visitors into hardware vendors, consumers and app writers. Imagine the success of Linus's first announcement if he told people which lines they could stand in to appreciate Linux when he was done writing it..
Digging deeper than you appeared to be welcome would get you into setup tasks with AOSP.. There is no better way to lose help then to ask them to learn about a more complete competitor.
"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."
Would love to hear some reasoning from the folks from HMD about this.
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.
It's been running on the Firefox OS quite slow. Having in mind a very poor functionality, I considered to switch to Android. When I installed Android, it was a total game changer. It was fast and smooth (back in 2014 of course, not now) and I never installed Firefox OS again.
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.
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.
As a user, I for example much prefer the harsh controls that Linux distributions have in place. If it's in the repository, you can essentially be sure that it does not do anything that's not probably actually in your interest, and just as well that it is actually decent software, somehow useful to someone. Probably the best software in its class, available on the platform, too.
Yeah, it also means that less is available on the platform. That maybe the highest quality software in a class is not always as high quality as in other distribution platforms, but for most jobs really, you don't need the non-plus-ultra, you need a tool that does the job and one of which you know that it does the job, without trying it out for hours or having to fight defaults that work against you.
On Android, F-Droid sort of provides that, but it's still just a small island of decency glued on top of a system and ecosystem that lives off of user-hostile behaviour. If as a user you don't know of F-Droid, you're hardly going to find these decent apps in that sea of not-so-decent apps, which really discourages the creation of decent apps as well.
With a curated platform, you could provide the user with trust in their platform (which might especially also be sellable to businesses) and you can keep the air free around those actually decent apps.
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15293436 is the only source I can find, but I'm sure I've seen it elsewhere)
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.
I'm just saying that whatever OS will be useless to a lot of people if it doesn't run what they want it to. One way to do that is to make it compatible with Android apps, which have already a version of virtually every major app.
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?
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...
>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.
