I have actually developed for this platform. KaiOS powers Jio Phone and Reliance JIO is by far their largest customer (and also an investor from what I know).
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.
> 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.
I think there actually was and is a lot of outside interest in a open and web stack oriented phoneOS.
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."
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:
Out of topic, what's the purpose of physical numpad in a modern phone? Inputting text with T9? Pure nostalgy? Fill the void because bigger screen would be too expensive?
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?
The speed I could type text messages with T9 is something I will never achieve with my iphone.
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.
Some people just like it more, if they have haptic feedback. It's "The Feel". You can do this without watching the screen, for example. Not everyone wants a PC in their pocket. Some just need a phone, that does connect them to more than just another phone and let's them shoot photos, I guess.
Is it scroll wheel hijacking when the scroll itself works as intended (as configured by the user) but some part of the content "locks" to the viewport? I'd say it doesn't touch the wheel at all.
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.
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
That's probably why Google is using the Progressive Web App version of Google Maps on Android Go instead of a native app...
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.
...or there are just many different ways to solve for the massive variety of problems, and developers with a huge variety of backgrounds, and Google is trying to help them all?
p.s. I am a Googler
What isn't so understandable is having a speech as if on the next door employees of the same company weren't exactly speaking the opposite.
I don't understand how in stage A one can speak how glorious the future of native apps is going to be, while on Stage B we are hearing how web apps are going to win the war against native apps and PWA are the path to it.
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.
The problem is that a web app can never be good enough, because a web app can never be secure. I simply can't trust my private data to a PWA, because the developer can ship me malicious JavaScript at any time. With open source I can compile and audit code myself (or rely on others to do so for me); with an app store I can rely on a vendor to audit code; with a web app I have no assurance.
Exactly. Android had a native stack and it also had terrible performance. I don’t think it was any worse than WebOS’s.
There’s good reason to blelieve that given enough time and even a fraction of resources that the Android team had WebOS would be able to significantly up their performance game (I say a fraction of resources because there is a lot of well funded open source development being done to improve web tech on mobile, through Chromium, WebKit and Firefox that would be leveraged).
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.
> 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..
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.
Mainly due to the average consumer not being interested in installing an app for something like LetGo or OfferUp (Craigslist competitors). Even Facebook works well in a mobile browser, with push notifications even!
In my experience it doesn't matter what you use to make an app with as long as it fits the use case. I've seen great web apps and horrible ones. I've also seen great native apps and ones with horrible experiences equally. It's all a balance act of using the technology you know best and which covers your needs best.
To me the mistake that was made with Firefox os was going after android instead of going after chromebooks. If firefox os had been designed to run on commodity x86 hardware like chromium os it would not have fallen so hard because a lot of people would be able to run it on an old laptop even if no one was making official hardware for it. Because these run html5 web apps the lack of appstore depth would have been a non-issue as well.
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.
Well, there is a point to be made, especially for Android, how poor the quality of the average app is and how they can often even be malicious.
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.
It's a good way to not get developers on board. Yes, you can easily develop for iOS/Android and as a result the respective stores are drowned in crap. Merely publishing on there will give you zero visibility. On curated platforms, there's the benefit of being a big fish in a small pond.
Apple didn't start out with a curated store, they started out with "open" HTML5 apps that couldn't do shit.
Today, Apple barely can do quality control on the iOS store, Google essentially doesn't bother, why should a small shop deal with the issue right off the bat?
I couldn't find a link to the source code. Then I found this:
>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.
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.
Ah, understood. I hope I didn't sound offended, just confused until I read your reply.
I agree that it is similar to Google in that they seem to hedge their bets too much (like how Google has two OS, two languages...etc etc). I would really like a third popular OS...there are so many out there, but with no steam (this, firefoxOS, sailfish...)
I remember. There was excellent Nokia hardware and shit software. The only way to get access to proper APIs that the other 2 platforms had was to become a Microsoft partner. The blame for that debacle rests entirely with Microsoft. They had lots to say, but not an ounce of willpower to back it up.
to be fair, by "shit" I mean boring or uninteresting. The core components were lean and performant, no complaints there. However, it was near impossible to make new/exciting/relevant software for the WP platform if you didn't have their blessing to do so. It was a grave sin imo. An underdog mobile OS needs all the talent it can get; they sabotaged themselves.
Symbian programming platform was a nightmare: C++ with no exceptions, no STL and no RAII. You couldn't use any normal C++ programming idioms, you had to use Symbian-specific memory management primitives. A quote from TheRegister article:
> "Symbian is the only platform that has to spend one day teaching people how to use strings before they can code in it. The approved method is that you create an HBufC (a Heap allocated, BUFfer that is Constant), then Call Des() on it (which returns a TPtr - a pointer to a writable descriptor),"
This is definitely a promising OS. The fact that they have a maps app is extremely important. I think they'll also need a WhatsApp app to be truly competitive. They could use a few other mainstream messaging apps too. The mbasic Facebook messenger should work fine on this OS.
No, and they said several times that they had no plans for it (which might have changed, to be fair). Their roadmap was to target servers, which have a use for secure OS and sane driver requirements.
From the website, it appears that all apps are written in HTML5+CSS+JS, however they target feature phones with 256MB of RAM and claim to have a long battery life.
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?
Electron isn't a good benchmark here because every app spawns it's own Chrome renderer process. In the case of Kai, I'd imagine they'd only need to spawn a single instance, and just add/remove view handles as needed.
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 and less responsive than the $100 unlocked Lumia I bought myself years ago was. But I don't see another platform succeeding here.
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...
I still have a ZTE Open C with me. It has 512MB of RAM and 2-core CPU.
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.
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.
Nice: it looks like the system font — for the Alcatel Go Flip and Nokia 8110 4G at least — is Open Sans. I've been using Source Sans Pro for most things lately, but I did always like Open Sans.
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 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.
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.
It's not a "no on giving back". You only have to make available the source for products you ship, and KaiOS itself is not the one shipping the devices, so it's up to the OEMs to provide the source they use on their phones (they do their own customizations).
That being said, I'm trying to get us to open source the "base" version which is provided to OEMs.
Can I assume you're involved with KaiOS development? Android vendors have a terrible reputation about pushing security updates in a timely manner (or at all for devices that aren't the current flagship). Do you have any plans to contractually force or otherwise encourage vendors to push security updates?
> You only have to make available the source for products you ship
That's a bit disingenous. Android wasn't shipping anything and it always released sources, as far as I know. Same for almost any Linux distribution out there. Common courtesy calls for distributing at least "release" versions, like RedHat and even Apple do.
That, to me, sounds like you're currently taking the minimalist "we'll release the bare minimum we are legally forced to, and nothing else" stance, which is basically equivalent to "we are not going to give back anything if we can avoid it".
I do hope this will change in the future, although given the realities of embedded development (cut-throat and all), I wouldn't be surprised if it never did. I think I'll keep rooting for more open players in the space.
Yeah, it would be awesome to have this open-source, with the help of the community one can achieve great things.
There was this project for FirefoxOS to support J2ME apps -- https://github.com/mozilla/pluotsorbet It would be great to have something like that for "nostalgic" reasons. Many feature phones' users remember J2ME apps, games especially, very fondly. Check out also this J2ME project, which could potentially be ported to KaiOS as well: https://github.com/XerTheSquirrel/SquirrelJME
Also, have you considered some kind of support for "content blocking" (like in iOS, or in the form of typical browser plugin-ins), of course, I'm not saying that ANY content should be blocked by default. But taking into account that devices with KaiOS wouldn't be very powerful, it could be really useful to have such an option to avoid "unnecessary" stuff when browsing the Internet...
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" 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.
> Something invaluable to me on an iPhone is the switch to silence alerts.
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.
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.
The first generation of android one's phones (the ones that released in India and Indonesia, powered by mediatek mt6582) have this. They even sometimes have the monthly security update early (for example, the November update is rolled out in late October).
Sadly, the newer generation does not have that. Google given up the update to the vendor, which in turn do what they do best, not updating the goddamn phone.
The focus of Android One seems to be running an unmodified Android? I don't think there is an emphasis on a minimum hardware spec. The phones showcased there do impress.. https://www.android.com/one/ Is there a requirement for how long the phones are supported with software/security updates?
If I were to add to the brief spec I defined above I'd also require speakers at both ends of the phone for stereo output, and require keeping the 3.5mm jack (yay S9?). I still think Samsung likes to make slippery bar-soap phones that I cant hold.
I still don't like how permissions are done even on LineageOS - I wish I could grant access to the camera for an app "for the next 5 minutes".
Android Treble is, at long last, decoupling Android OS porting from the cycle of BSP support. It's only for Android 8+, so the impact won't be widespread until later this year and into 2019. But this should enable vendors to lengthen their update support more independently of the underlying kernel and driver support.
Large parts of Android-the-OS is implemented in middleware running on the same runtime as Android's apps, which should have made this kind of portability possible earlier in the development of Android. But here it is.
I really want PostMarketOS to succeed, for one because it would be really neat to have an open phone OS but also because I think it would cut down a lot on the number of phones that end up being demolished long before their actual life-span is at an end.
Have you looked into a DIY battery replacement?[1] I've replaced "non removable" batteries and cracked screens in several phones over the years (the latest being a Nexus 5X) and it's definitely doable if you have a steady hand, patience, and the right tools.
Couldn't find any numbers for battery life comparison between original and postmarketOS. Could you share your experience please? (Your last line seems to indicate there might be a significant increase)
I haven't used Postmarket because no software can fix the battery issues with that phone.
If I could easily swap out the battery and also install Postmarket, I would do both. As of now, I can't get a new battery and will therefore do neither.
> 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.
I don't really agree with the claim. What allowed the Linux desktop to take off was extreme security problems in Windows and generally a terrible user experience. Anyone adopting Linux had to put up with constant hardware incompatibility issues. It's just that Windows was so bad that it was worth it. (I made the switch sometime around 2003, and have been Linux-only for more than a decade.)
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.
I think what they meant was hardware standardization and commoditzation driven by PC clones allowed linux to target a cheap standardized hardware platform that IBM had no legal standing to control after Microsoft started selling windows separately, etc. Or something. I was still in diapers, but if you don’t believe me, Neil Stephenson explained this in ‘In the beginning there was the command line.’
Also, I think terrible security and user experience applies to Android now too.
I am a pretty happy Windows user and developer since Windows 3.1.
My main reason to use Linux distributions was to be able to do university work at home.
After all I wouldn't be able to buy an Aix or DG/UX license, the UNIXes we had on campus before computing department started to deploy Linux based PCs.
I always dual booted and tried a few times to just use it as desktop, but eventually gave up on it.
My travel netbook and mobile devices are the only gear still running some form of Linux.
This is not completely true. I was pretty happy with Windows as my Desktop OS, despite the occasional horrors. All my games worked, Visual C worked and most of the random utilities worked.
I partially switched to Linux just as an adventure, because I could.
Hehe, my experience was kind of similar. I was not really unhappy with Windows (98), I had just grown curious about Linux due to all the media hype it got at the time (2000-ish).
After I got past the initial "This is really weird"-phase, Linux was an eye opener. Other than that I use Windows at work, I have not looked back since.
Strictly speaking it is not about GNU/Linux per se, but Windows vs. Unix. One of the BSDs could fill that place just as well, but on Linux, hardware support is usually better, plus the mainstream Linux distros tend to be more friendly to lazy or non-techie users.
When I first started using Linux (2000), the desktop was still rather clunky. Both KDE and Gnome were so immature I eventually settled on Windowmaker for a few years.
OTOH, the Linux- / free Unix-desktop has come a long way since then. For my personal machines, I think GNU/Linux plus MATE makes for a much better desktop than Windows these days. (Admittedly, my taste might be slightly non-mainstream.)
Sometimes finding it difficult to do something is an indication you might have a suboptimal work flow.
You can get plenty of info about the health of the drive while the system is running.
There isn't much reason to run a filesystem check unless something is wrong.
Speaking of services it's extremely easy to query which services are running and enable and disable stuff. Plus there aren't 85 different things running.
These look nice but the big problem is that they may not be compatible and maintained over the long term because they are not a std part of the desktop.
Because they aren't needed. We can pretend that the intended user base is your cousin and your grandma if you want but the people that actually use Linux have no problem enabling and disabling services with the command line.
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.
> [WebOS] had such a natural interface for multitasking too.
On the MeeGo OS used on the Nokia N9, it requires swiping in one direction a couple of times to get to the open tasks screen. You can then press and hold on the screen to allow for closing any app(s) you want and click on the done button after you're finished.
Closing an app requires just swiping from the top to the bottom. IIRC, WebOS required you to swipe upward to get to the task screen and then swipe upward again to close the app.
Yeah, but on WebOS it was a little different... the home screen was actually the open app list, and the app launcher was accessed from that home screen; compared to iOS, which has the app launcher as the home screen, and the open app list as a semi-hidden double-click feature.
I much prefer WebOS's approach. On the other hand, in those days you wouldn't really have more than a few apps open at once, unlike iPads which could have dozens of apps or browser tabs. So who knows if WebOS's style would translate well to today's usage patterns.
You are probably referring to FxOS targeting emerging markets where smartphones were not common, so the hardware (thus cheaper) was expected to be very weak.
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.
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.
IIRC Android is the most common operating system on Earth, while Linux desktops are still around 5% market share. Seems like desktop Linux needs to do as Android does to take off, not the other way around?
Android arrived when the smartphone marked was in its infancy, whereas Linux emerged much later in the development cycle of the PC market, when it was way too late.
If IBM could have chosen a free and open DOS for its first PCs, the market would look very different today.
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.
1. Companies distributing Google Play Services has to sign an agreement not to ship (or even build) a non-Google Android-derived phone.
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)
Smartphones are commoditized and there are non-Google Android smartphones on the market, so they should be able to get some made. Also, they can just buy any unlocked phone at retail, replace the OS, rebrand and resell (obviously this limits the market due to high price, but also requires no upfront investment).
As for Play Services, they could just have a team whose job is to make MicroG work exactly like Play Services so that all apps work including the Google apps.
The only Google app that you need to replicate is the Play Store client (or really, the downloader, since you can just use the Play Store website for the UI) and then the user can install all the Google apps from the Play Store.
As for getting developers to put apps in their store, it's certainly much easier than getting them to write another app.
The problem is that would still be Android. Which means they'd still be beholden to Google, having to support their code, maintain compatibility with their design decisions, etc. That's not a good place for any serious business to be in.
Because writing a whole OS from scratch competing with giant companies and having to somehow magically go from 0 to a million apps (while being unpopular due to the few apps) is a good place to be in?
Instead, they could have gotten all the Android apps and the popularity of Android essentially for free.
It's even possible they could have overtaken Google and became the effective steward of the Android platform, since Google doesn't offer a version that can be installed by users and also doesn't offer their version to OEMs with no strings attached.
Again, they still can do that now, since there still isn't a version of Android that runs on any phone other than LineageOS, which is relatively underfunded.
[obviously what Mozilla would gain from this is market share for Firefox for Android]
Who on earth wants an android phone but is waiting for a fork from some random company before they make the switch? Your argument applies to approximately nobody. If someone wants an android phone right now they can pick from literally thousands of devices.
On the other hand, I'm already a KaiOS customer because they power the phone I want: the one that makes calls and handles text messages, and then gives me a high-speed network for my computer. I spend about a quarter of my time in India; while there I got a Jio phone and liked it so much I found a KaiOS device that works in the US as well.
>Instead, they could have gotten all the Android apps and the popularity of Android essentially for free.
No they wouldn't have. They would not get Google Play Services and your MicroG "solution" is ridiculous from a commercial perspective and a violation from a TOS perspective that would be shut down by Google.
>It's even possible they could have overtaken Google and became the effective steward of the Android platform
I don't think you understand the army of developers it takes to maintain and enhance Android on an annual basis nor the millions of dollars it costs Google. To even suggest that they would have overtaken Google and become the steward of the Android platform is ridiculous.
As a strange event, I actually upvoted bitmapbrother, we agreed on something! As he says, MicroG is a hack, and there's no reasonable point where someone is going to take stewardship of Android away from Google. (Other than antimonopoly action.)
There's no point in having Android if you can't run Android apps, and most Android apps users want are now dependent on Google's proprietary libraries (Play Services). So why would you want an Android fork if you aren't going to be able to run Android apps? Might as well go with KaiOS at that point.
What does a browser have to do with Google Play Services? Google Play Services, like the name implies, supplies services to apps and games. Without these services a large majority of apps that rely on them will cease to work on an Android phone without Google Play Services.
I was thinking that with a browser the need for on-phone apps is significantly reduced.
If one does want or need native apps (e.g. for security), then is it possible for a third party to emulate Google Play Services? Or do they use a certificate to prevent third-party clones?
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.
Remember all those feature phones with a plethora of custom operating systems? Almost none of the users cared (or knew) what the OS was. This is an OS for that kind of device. Nokia is shipping it right now.
The target market might not care or know what the OS is, but they'll want to use software they're used to: Google Maps, Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, Tinder, Skype, games, etc.
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.
Are you sure you know the target market you're speaking of? They're not coming from Android world, so they're probably used to exactly the kind of services these phones support.
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.