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A comment on KaiOS takes on the Apple-Android mobile duopoly. Parent comment

Re:KaiOS takes on the Apple-Android mobile duopoly by rchaud on Thursday April 25, 2019 @06:40PM (#19753173)
Firefox OS was pitched as a direct competitor to iOS and Android, which itself was a death sentence when you saw the kind of hardware it was launched on. "Severely underpowered" would be generous. Plus they launched at a time when mobile web (that FF OS depended on for app delivery) features were awful compared to native apps.

Their timing was poor too. The market was saturated with alternative OSes back then and not enough PR oxygen to go around.

- Nokia Meego OS

- Windows Phone

- Blackberry Playbook OS/BB10 OS

- Sailfish OS (ex-Nokia people)

- Ubuntu Touch OS - WebOS

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Re:KaiOS takes on the Apple-Android mobile duopoly by StudentStuff on Thursday April 25, 2019 @07:22PM (#19753451)
The point was to eat the bottom of the cellular phone market, as Mozilla saw Blackberry dying, Ubuntu Touch & Android requiring way too much resources, and Windows Phone killing Meego yet not succeeding in retaining Nokia's marketshare.

What Mozilla built was an OS that could run on very basic hardware (eg: what an OEM can build for $5 to $10) and be more usable than the alternatives out there that were even more expensive.

A price war led by Mozilla was never going to pan out without buy-in from the OEMs and cell carriers, but after Mozilla ditched the project, Qualcomm seems to have decided KaiOS is the only reasonable thing for basic phones to run, and Google is funding it just enough to encourage integration of some Google services.

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Re:KaiOS takes on the Apple-Android mobile duopoly by petra on Thursday April 25, 2019 @10:20PM (#19754314)
Let's say KaiOS today is owned by Mozilla with it's current user base. How does it help Mozilla ?

Does it help to keep the web open? Does it bring revenues to justify the risk and loss of focus ?

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Re:KaiOS takes on the Apple-Android mobile duopoly by yumraj on Thursday April 25, 2019 @10:44PM (#19754428)
Same as Google. KaiOS ships with Firefox by default, they get eyeballs, they get search revenue from default search engine and so and so forth.
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Re:KaiOS takes on the Apple-Android mobile duopoly by abacadaba on Thursday April 25, 2019 @11:07PM (#19754513)
I'll admit to being critical of the effort at the time, wanting focus to be on the browser. Ahead of it's time maybe. In 2019 making PWA's first class citizen doesn't seem so crazy, and might allow it to get to a viable ecosystem.
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