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Firefox OS has been rebranded as KaiOS, and its eating marketshare with $5 LTE bar and flip phones. Said devices are pretty minimally specced with a Qualcomm 20

Firefox OS has been rebranded as KaiOS, and its eating marketshare with $5 LTE bar and flip phones. Said devices are pretty minimally specced with a Qualcomm 205 and 128MB of Ram, but Mozilla did a great job optimizing for low end devices.

jrochkind1 7y ago
I only know of one flip phone sold in the U.S with KaiOS. I had one. It was a terrible flip phone. And I know flip phones. Like, the flip phone of 10 years ago did not give you a delay every time you pressed a button. The KaiOS one did. It also did not have installable 'apps' as was the original promise of KaiOS. It's UX was generally very confusing (yes, flip phones have a UX; you notice especially when it's a bad one). I don't know if it's doing better in non-US markets. But I don't think so; someone else _did_ take the Firefox OS source code which of course had an open source license, and adopt it and rebrand it as KaiOS. I am not sure what their aspirations for it are. Currently, I do not think it is the promise of what people hoped FirefoxOS would be (and may or may not ever have been).
carmate383 7y ago
Source for the supposed "eating" of global marketshare? I can't find any marketshare report that even mentions such an OS.
- commoner 7y ago
  KaiOS is relatively successful in India, with 15% market share for mobile devices in 2018 (second place). https://www.bgr.in/news/jiophone-kaios-surpasses-ios-india-second-most-popular-mobile-operating-system-android-smartphones-feature-phones-jio-4g/ https://www.bgr.in/news/jiophone-kaios-surpasses-ios-india-s...
  - carmate383 7y ago
    How exactly is that "eating up global market share"?
    - ChrisSD 7y ago
      The actual quote was "eating marketshare with $5 LTE bar and flip phones".
- panpanna 7y ago
  Aren't Nokia/hmd featurephones all running kaios?
  - carmate383 7y ago
    A failed OS is being paired with a failing Mobile manufacturer. Good riddance.
  - fulafel 7y ago
    There seem to be Series 30 phones still: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_30%2B#Made_by_HMD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_30%2B#Made_by_HMD
  - Dunedan 7y ago
    The only Nokia phone running KaiOS so far is the Nokia 8110 4G (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_8110_4G https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_8110_4G).
toastal 7y ago
To be clear, KaiOS was not rebranded; it was forked, closed sourced and further developed -- mostly to work with touch-less, feature phones. Mozilla is neither maintaining nor associated with it in any way.
- metildaa 7y ago
  How could an MPL & GPL licensed project be closed sourced? Mozilla didn't relicense Firefox iirc.
  - nine_k 7y ago
    How macOS can be proprietary, while Darwin is open source? By being mostly proprietary in new and important parts, built on top of an open foundation which itself is not the most valuable part for customers. I suspect that key parts of Kai OS are proprietary, and the foundation left from Firefox OS is very basic. Important, but totally insufficient.
    - synchronise 7y ago
      Actually, there's not been much change from the original fork of FirefoxOS besides the UI changes to be better for non-touch devices. GerdaOS (LineageOS for KaiOS) allows people to import and run FirefoxOS packages without modification, though many apps will need some changes to allow it to work without a touchscreen. The unofficial rumour mill says that with the extra investment from Google, KaiOS will probably shift to Chrome(ium) at some point in the future, but that's just a rumour and remains to be seen.
      - metildaa 7y ago
        I doubt KaiOS would switch to Chromium, the focus seems to be using near zero resources while remaining somewhat fast. Mozilla spent years with dozens to hundreds of devs working on getting it to be snappier than every other low end phone, short of Google paying for this type of dev work on KaiOS, there will likely be nothing more than security patches and cosmetic changes to KaiOS.
_nedR 7y ago
I dont consider KaiOS a positive development. To me the biggest thing missing in Android that Mozilla could bring to the table is user privacy and the expectation of putting the user's welfare first (above data collection and monetization). Similar to Firefox vs Chrome. I trust KaiOS less than Android in that regard.

jrochkind1 7y ago

I only know of one flip phone sold in the U.S with KaiOS. I had one. It was a terrible flip phone. And I know flip phones. Like, the flip phone of 10 years ago did not give you a delay every time you pressed a button. The KaiOS one did. It also did not have installable 'apps' as was the original promise of KaiOS. It's UX was generally very confusing (yes, flip phones have a UX; you notice especially when it's a bad one). I don't know if it's doing better in non-US markets. But I don't think so; someone else _did_ take the Firefox OS source code which of course had an open source license, and adopt it and rebrand it as KaiOS. I am not sure what their aspirations for it are. Currently, I do not think it is the promise of what people hoped FirefoxOS would be (and may or may not ever have been).

carmate383 7y ago

Source for the supposed "eating" of global marketshare? I can't find any marketshare report that even mentions such an OS.

commoner 7y ago
KaiOS is relatively successful in India, with 15% market share for mobile devices in 2018 (second place). https://www.bgr.in/news/jiophone-kaios-surpasses-ios-india-second-most-popular-mobile-operating-system-android-smartphones-feature-phones-jio-4g/ https://www.bgr.in/news/jiophone-kaios-surpasses-ios-india-s...
- carmate383 7y ago
  How exactly is that "eating up global market share"?
  - ChrisSD 7y ago
    The actual quote was "eating marketshare with $5 LTE bar and flip phones".
panpanna 7y ago
Aren't Nokia/hmd featurephones all running kaios?
- carmate383 7y ago
  A failed OS is being paired with a failing Mobile manufacturer. Good riddance.
- fulafel 7y ago
  There seem to be Series 30 phones still: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_30%2B#Made_by_HMD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_30%2B#Made_by_HMD
- Dunedan 7y ago
  The only Nokia phone running KaiOS so far is the Nokia 8110 4G (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_8110_4G https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_8110_4G).

toastal 7y ago

To be clear, KaiOS was not rebranded; it was forked, closed sourced and further developed -- mostly to work with touch-less, feature phones. Mozilla is neither maintaining nor associated with it in any way.

metildaa 7y ago
How could an MPL & GPL licensed project be closed sourced? Mozilla didn't relicense Firefox iirc.
- nine_k 7y ago
  How macOS can be proprietary, while Darwin is open source? By being mostly proprietary in new and important parts, built on top of an open foundation which itself is not the most valuable part for customers. I suspect that key parts of Kai OS are proprietary, and the foundation left from Firefox OS is very basic. Important, but totally insufficient.
  - synchronise 7y ago
    Actually, there's not been much change from the original fork of FirefoxOS besides the UI changes to be better for non-touch devices. GerdaOS (LineageOS for KaiOS) allows people to import and run FirefoxOS packages without modification, though many apps will need some changes to allow it to work without a touchscreen. The unofficial rumour mill says that with the extra investment from Google, KaiOS will probably shift to Chrome(ium) at some point in the future, but that's just a rumour and remains to be seen.
    - metildaa 7y ago
      I doubt KaiOS would switch to Chromium, the focus seems to be using near zero resources while remaining somewhat fast. Mozilla spent years with dozens to hundreds of devs working on getting it to be snappier than every other low end phone, short of Google paying for this type of dev work on KaiOS, there will likely be nothing more than security patches and cosmetic changes to KaiOS.

_nedR 7y ago

I dont consider KaiOS a positive development. To me the biggest thing missing in Android that Mozilla could bring to the table is user privacy and the expectation of putting the user's welfare first (above data collection and monetization). Similar to Firefox vs Chrome. I trust KaiOS less than Android in that regard.