Before starting i’m assuming you already know what is an operating system?
can you name some of them?! windows , macOS , ios, symbian ohk… kaiOS.
wait, u never heard of kaiOS?
u must be living under a rock?
Content of the blog:
– what is kaiOs
– why you should know about it and
– what is so special about it?!
and at last we’ll discuss developer guide for kaiOs.
if you are from india or asian country then you must’ve heard about jiophone. these phones are t-9 keypad phones with limited feature & available in cheapest price as possible. jiophones uses kaiOs as operating system.
The operating system ( kaiOS ) first appeared in 2017 and is developed by KaiOS Technologies Inc., a San Diego, California-based company headed by CEO Sebastien Codeville with offices in other countries. In June 2018, Google invested US$22 million in the operating system.India-based telecom operator Reliance Jio also invested $7 million in cash to pick up a 16% take in the company.
KaiOS supports powerful features like 4G/LTE, Wi-Fi, NFC, and QWERTY keyboards. It is based on open-standard HTML5 and allows CSS and Javascript. In fact, our OS is so light that it can even run on phones with just 256MB of memory.
List of phones which uses kaiOs : (as by aug 2019) :
-Alcatel Go Flip 2
-Cat B35Doro 7050 and 7060
-Energy E241S and E241
-JioPhone (Reliance Jio)
-JioPhone 2 (Reliance Jio)
-MaxCom 241
-MTN Smart
-Multilaser ZAPP
-Nokia 8110 (HMD Global)
-Orange Sanza
-Positivo P70S
-Sigma mobile X-Style S3500 sKai
-WizPhone WP00
With the release of the Nokia 8110 4G, an active community around both KaiOS and the phone arose and released the first version of jailbreak. This gave users the ability to use old Firefox OS apps on the KaiOS devices, as well as flashing their devices with community created ROMs, such as GerdaOS.
In market share study results announced in May 2018, KaiOS beat Apple’s iOS for second place in India,while Android dominates with 71%, albeit down by 9%. KaiOS growth is being largely attributed to popularity of the competitively-priced JioPhone.
so basically kaiOs phones have whatsapp, facebook, google assistant & a store full of apps.
we cannot compare this to full featured smartphone but still this phone support almost all basic needs of avg. human from phone.
Jiophones or similar phones with kaiOs can be used as secondary phone but the wide range of features and apps it supported, i can even use it as my daily driver.
Best part about it… these phones have low resolution and small screens so longer battery life.
So basically what you are getting? a phone which supports all basic things like whatsapp, facebook, app store, LTE/4G , google assistant, wi-fi etc. with longer battery life, 3 days to 4 days in some of the phones listed above.
and if you are a developer then this is even more exciting to you as now jailbreak is possible on these devices.
Developers guide for kaiOs:
how to develop an app for kaiOs?!
KaiOs supoorted apps created with html,css & javascript so a web developer can easily built apps for these devices.
how to do that?!
old firefoxOS docs are very helpful, you should consider them first but i would still suggest you to go to kaiOS offcial website to check the proper flow for the application development.
First you should understand how applications actually work in kaiOS environment and for that you need to first understand the architecture for that. You can give a read to Architecture .
Then comes setup for your application which you will find here at Environment setup . Mozzila firefox shift+F8 will open the webIDE where you can see your devices connected but for that you should have proper drivers installed for your phone. You can use firefox emulator 2.2 (stable) as well for initial start.
Now its time to have your first application onboard to kaiOS . You can make your application in any of the client specific JS like angular , react or even plain javascript but the important part is to have manifest.webapp in root folder for compatibility.
You are able to see your first application on your Now the real pain arrives when it comes to navigate through the application by keypad but thanks to naviboard library which will do this work for you to align your navigable items and navigate through it by simple API’s.
When you are done with navigation part of feature phone, you can go through and develop as much as you can as if it is a web application and can develop a lot of things.
Resources for the kaiOs developers ( beginners):
– Firefox OS app beginners tutorial
–Creating & editing apps : Firefox Developer tools
– Publishing apps yourself: Mozilla
– Firefox OS app development guide
If some information is wrong in the blog feel free to correct me in comment section. Feedbacks are welcome too.
freaky writes here 