Imagine if Mozilla were what it says it is and had released Firefox OS under GPL…
Instead, they did the research and development (with some of your money, if you donate to them) for a third-party company to come and close it off in a commercial product. Oh and for their patron, Google, to invest $20 million on top to create closed “smart feature phones” to farm the data of the <strike>poors</strike> “next five billion.”
*golf claps*
https://tuxphones.com/smart-feature-phones-revolution-kai-os/
@aral Did look promising, as did Ubuntu Phone, but the problem was app stores. Even Windows Phone which though late managed to capture 3% of the market struggled to get app parity with Apple and Google, even paying developers to port. After that the only alternative mobile OSs to gain any traction were those with Google Play, meaning they were basically Android based, such as Amazon Fire.
Yeah but this time, #kaios is targeting a different market: smart feature phones. These phones are not #dumpphone nor #smartphone. Not everyone wants one of these but for some like me it is actually the best choice(with respect to #ios and #android). Also KaiOS is partially #opensource like the #linux #kernel and the #gecko used.
You can see the source code of #b2g used in #kaios3 here:
https://github.com/kaiostech/gecko-b2g
A friend, @affe_null told me long time ago he was successful to compile it and run it on a custom Linux for the #bananaphone
Not sure if it was #postmarketos or his #debian port for that phone. However it was much less than useful because of the lack of hardware features, stock apps(telephony, messaging, etc) and a system app to manage these apps which are all closed source.
@Suoko @freequaybuoy @aral @affe_null
That's the main reason I chose #kaios over #android when I was about to get a new phone. I instead have got a #eink #android #ebook_reader which I read #scientific papers and books on it. Of course, I have chat software like #matrix and #telegram on it too but I don't carry it everywhere and chatting on touch keyboard is not pleasing for me either so the main purpose of this device is left to reading :)
@farooqkz @aral @affe_null That's really interesting! Thanks
@farooqkz @freequaybuoy @aral @affe_null I'd say it's great for teenagers to avoid them to become addicted to smartphones but still keeping them connected to mainstream communication apps