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Google invests $22 million in the OS powering Nokia feature phones
Google is investing $22 million into KaiOS, the feature phone operating system that has risen from the ashes of Mozilla's Firefox OS. While Google rules the smartphone world with Android, KaiOS is slowly emerging as a popular choice for feature phones, particularly in emerging markets. KaiOS started last year as a forked version of Firefox OS, and the operating system ships on some Nokia-branded feature phones like the Nokia 8110. Devices from TCL and Micromax are also powered by KaiOS.
Google's investment might seem odd given its Android dominance, and its efforts with Android Go, but it's clearly strategic. "Google and KaiOS have also agreed to work together to make the Google Assistant, Google Maps, YouTube, and Google Search available to KaiOS users," says KaiOS CEO Sebastien Codeville.
I always liked the ideas behind Firefox OS, but the promised $10 to $25 smartphone never materialized. Would you use a KaiOS phone?
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 29 2018, @09:10AM
The price point wasn't the issue since that's mostly in the hands of the hardware people. The problem was Mozilla moved to other technologies company wide. The Javascript+HTML5(online/offline) switched to WebASM+HTML5(online). The C++ switched to Rust. The WebASM switch is especially huge since it's a completely new stack based (like Forth) s-expression (like Lisp) language with a strict binary encoding that is written, secured and optimized completely differently from JavaScript or Java but substitutes both in the online and offline use cases. And as such, addresses both the business need to replace Java and the technical needs to kill Javascript (and burn it; and bury it where no one can ever see it's ugly face again).
As for the openness issue, an s-expression binary format with 1:1 text representation is more readable then most Javascript out there. And being stack machine means there weren't be duplicated routines for pipelining like in Java or x86 executables so we're talking about some really lean & clean debugging workflow here. But hey, you already have webassembly in your browser so pop open that built-in debugger and look up examples online and see for yourself. Quite hacking friendly if you ask me.