KaiOS Basic Research

1.Summary

1.Background introduction

As the large popularity in India and its developing status, the common and urgent needs of digital phone services are whole coming recently. Base on this situation, from 2017, the development of KaiOS was started by KaiOS technologies which belong to the greatest telecommunication industry tycoon in India.

2.Description

KaiOS is a light Linux-based OS which provides the affordable high-tech method to combine speedy OS with the non-touch phone (feature phone).

Via this system, non-smartphone is able to realize all kinds of intelligent functions, which means, the digital service such as the installation of smartphone applications, is reachable in feature phone for more people. In this condition, a dumb phone becomes the smartphone by using KaiOS.

2.Main features

Features	Description
4G/LTE	Support
Wi-fi	Support
NFC	Support
QWERTY keyboard	Support
Third-party Application in KaiStore	Support, developer-welcome and open resource
Voice Search	Support, intelligent assistant as the smartphone
Affordable Price (for feature phones)	More than half reduce in the expenditure on phone

As the above table shows, KaiOS supports 4G/LTE/Wi-fi and NFC function, even third-party applications can be downloaded from KaiStore to enrich the variety of this OS. It means that KaiOS is an open-source and developer-welcome operating system with sustainable development in the future.

3.Compatible Devices

For now:

• Alcatel OneTouch Go Flip (known as Cingular Flip 2 on AT&T)

• Reliance Jio JioPhone , JioPhone F101K, F10Q, F120B, F220B, F300B, F30C, F41T, F50Y, F61F, F81E, F90M, LF-2403N, JioPhone_2.

• Nokia 8110 4G (runs Smart Feature OS, a KaiOS-based platform)

• Doro 7050/7060

• CAT B35

• Maxcom MK241, MK281

• WizPhone WP006. Launched on Indonesia in Partnership with Google and Alfamart

• MTN 3G phone (model name TBD)

• Alcatel MyFlip (TracFone)

4.Marketing Analysis

1.Main Objective

A large number of feature phone users need a cost-effective and serviceable resolution to help them to improve the digital service quality.

2.India Marketing Portion

From 2018, KaiOS has been No.2 in ranking for a really long time as a prospecting OS. In this pie chart, it is apparent that KaiOS has a big part of the Indian market and stands firmly with more and more advanced and reinforced features.

3.India Marketing Analysis

There is no one reason why KaiOS exploded in popularity. Four of the top 10 most used devices in India run KaiOS, while Android and iOS lost market share in India as a result.

Another reason is the increasing demand for feature phones in India. According to Counterpoint Research, almost 23 million KaiOS-powered devices shipped in Q1 2018.

These two main and reasonable brought the booming of KaiOS in India. Besides, it depends on the giant telecommunication enterprise Jio as the initial platform to advertise and propagate their brand-new widespread OS, this flagship system in India enjoys a very great reputation.

In the market occupation stage, Jio used full-on strategies to gather more than 100 million users in 170 days. It is too rapid and too powerful compared with 852 days for Facebook or 780 days for Twitter.

4.Potential Application Market

Except for the existed Jio applications, there are also a large number of third-party applications which runs smoothly in KaiOS.

Google leads series A investment round in KaiOS to connect next billion users and there also consistent and ever-lasting improvement by KaiOS.

The most important reason is that KaiOS supports the third-party partners’ development and they published the official and handy tutorial for developers or cooperated teams to explore this OS with convenience and brief start.

5.Conclusion

In all, it is very practical and feasible in all kinds of scenarios, people are able to escape from the lacking of NFC function or 4G/LTE/WIFI network function in non-smartphone. The affordable price of feature phone and valuable function in the system layer, this combination is attractive and prospecting enough for most customers, especially for the common population in India.

As a developing OS, it is not only oriented in India as one short-term product but endeavors to prolong its circle of life all over the world.

It is an undoubtedly win-win strategy in this high-speed developing world. This innovative resolution brings more possibilities, which means it allows mobile carriers to tap into the developing market and also more people to reach the smart application service in the meantime.

5.Developer Portal

1.Introduction

KaiOS is a web-based mobile operating system that enables a new category of smart feature phones. It is forked from B2G (Boot to Gecko), a successor of the discontinued Firefox OS.

KaiOS brings the support of 4G/LTE, GPS, and Wi-Fi, as well as HTML5-based apps and longer battery life, to non-touch devices. It has an optimized user interface for smart feature phones, needs little memory, and consumes less energy than other operating systems. It also comes with the KaiStore, which enables users to download applications in categories like social media, games, navigation, and streaming entertainment.

1) Architecture

                                                          Architecture Illustration

Gaia (Front-End)

Gaia is the user interface of the KaiOS platform. Anything drawn on the screen once KaiOS has launched is a product of the Gaia layer. Gaia implements the lock screen, home screen, and all the standard applications you expect on a smart feature phone. Gaia on KaiOS is implemented using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Its only interfaces to the underlying operating system are through open Web APIs, which are implemented by the Gecko layer. Third-party applications can be installed alongside the Gaia layer.

Gaia is the core web app of the device and user interface layer, all written in HTML5, CSS and JavaScript, with a number of exposed APIs to allow the UI code to interact with the phone hardware and Gecko functionality.

Gecko

Gecko forms the KaiOS application runtime; that is, the layer that provides all of the support for the trifecta of open standards: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It makes sure those APIs work well on every operating system Gecko supports. This means Gecko includes, among other things, a networking stack, graphics stack, layout engine, a JavaScript virtual machine, and porting layers.

Gecko is the web engine and presentation layer in KaiOS that connects hardware to HTML by serving as the interface between web content and the underlying device. Gecko provides an HTML5 parsing and rendering engine, programmatic access to hardware functionality via secure web APIs, a comprehensive security framework, update management, and other core services.

Gonk

Gonk is the lower level operating system of the KaiOS platform, consisting of a Linux kernel (based on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP)) and a userspace Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL). The kernel and several of the userspace libraries are common open-source projects: Linux, libusb, bluez, and so forth. Some of the other parts of the HAL are shared with the AOSP: GPS, camera, and others.

You could say that Gonk is a very simple Linux distribution. Gonk is a porting target of Gecko; that is, there's a port of Gecko to Gonk, just like there's a port of Gecko to OS X, Windows, and Android. Since the KaiOS project has full control over Gonk, we can expose interfaces to Gecko that can't be exposed to other operating systems. For example, Gecko has direct access to the full telephony stack and display frame buffer on Gonk but doesn't have this access on any other operating system.

Gonk is the kernel-level component in the KaiOS stack that serves as the interface between Gecko and the underlying hardware. Gonk controls the underlying hardware and exposes hardware capabilities to Web APIs implemented in Gecko. Gonk can be seen as the “black box” that does all the complex, detailed work behind the scenes to control the mobile device by enacting requests at the hardware level.

                                                   Detailed Flow Illustration

2)Technologies

KaiOS apps are based on web technologies – HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and are run by Gecko runtime. If you have written a web page you already know the basics.

Rendering is done by parsing HTML/CSS and painted using graphical APIs. JavaScripts are executed by the JS engine SpiderMonkey and connected to C++ components by XPConnect and WebIDL bindings. Applications and the core process communicate only through IPC protocols defined by IPDL.

Additionally a set of core components including file and memory management, threads and data structures, etc. are provided through the XPCOM component object model.

2.Develop Stages

1) Environment setup

Firefox's WebIDE is a necessary development tool to inspect your app, as well as see the console, debugger, and others.

The following official online link is oriented for developers:

developer.kaiostech.com/environment…

2) Simulation in KaiOS

The simulator lets you run Gaia and Web apps in a Gecko-based environment somewhat similar to an actual device.

It doesn't emulate device hardware, so it's not adequate for testing device APIs and it isn't a replacement for testing on actual hardware. It can, therefore, be useful during the development of your application, or while working on the application user interface itself.

The following official online link covers downloading of the simulator, as well as how to use it:

developer.kaiostech.com/simulator

3) Applications and the related 

Contents Included:

Multiple Resolutions,Notifications,Storage,Catching,

Network State Changes,Manifest,App Permissions,

D-pad,Navigation,Softkeys,Emulated Cursor.

The following official online link is to provide the application example and related experiences for developers:

developer.kaiostech.com/first-app/s…

4) Run and Debug

After the former development for applications, let’s go running and debug the phrase to test the unfinished applications.

The following official link is to provide the functions of running and debugging the applications:

developer.kaiostech.com/run-and-deb…

5) API Reference

There is a large number of APIs to be used to refer to a suite of device compatibility, no matter audio or Bluetooth related.

The following official online link is for APIs:

developer.kaiostech.com/api

3.Submitting a New Application:

After the complete development, there is one specialized stage for third-party cooperators to submit their own applications in KaiOS official store.

1. Reading all the documentation in this portal is very fundamental as a primary stage. This helps a lot in understanding what is considered a qualified app for KaiOS.

2. Prepare an app manifest for the required fields. Submitting the application without a proper manifest is illegal for now. Read this section carefully before other following steps.

1. Do Include known the issues of the application with app submission.

2. Add an app’s test report in .txt format.

3. If this application is a hosted application, be sure that it includes the hosted application URL.

4. Agree to the "KaiOS Application Development Agreement" when signing up in the App Submission Portal.

5. Please contact KaiOS team via their contact form under “Partnership opportunities”. KaiOS will review all the proposals and send over their standard business terms.

Once the submitting step of this application is finished, the KaiStore team will review the submission and inform back with the result. In general, this process takes about two weeks.

The KaiStore team reserves the right to reject application submitting under the following circumstances:

• The above steps have not been followed.

• The required materials have not been submitted or are incomplete.

• This application does not meet our quality threshold in areas such as 'Basic function', 'Interaction', 'Stability', as well as 'Compatibility'.

After completing the above stages, the submission of one application is over.

6.Latent Problem

Google announced that they decided to invest Jio KaiOS with more than 20 million in mid of 2018. Regarding the involvement of Google, this operating system developing team will probably be influenced by Google.

Herein there is one hidden problem for confidential privacy security. Which means, in this OS, we are not very sure that there is no data outflow.

转载于:https://juejin.im/post/5cc6e65e6fb9a031ee3c1dc5