Comment by garganshum | Hacker News Reader

Comment by garganshum | Hacker News Reader

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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 it was combination of factors that shut down FireFox OS:

* The foundation was bleeding money and had to limit it's focus

* The Matchstick on KickStarter made FireFox OS look like a non-viable product

* Not a lot of chimerical interest outside from outside the community

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.

So what kind of apps did you make? Currently its a closed app store, so kind of curious to understand what is the barrier to entry to this ecosystem.

So do they have app store like android? Where anyone can make KaiOS Apps and upload it?

From their FAQ:

"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."

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