KaiOS is a mobile

Linux distribution A Linux distribution, often abbreviated as distro, is an operating system that includes the Linux kernel for its kernel functionality. Although the name does not imply product distribution per se, a distro—if distributed on its own—is oft ...

for

keypad A keypad is a block or pad of buttons set with an arrangement of digits, symbols, or alphabetical letters. Pads mostly containing numbers and used with computers are numeric keypads. Keypads are found on devices which require mainly numeric in ...

-based

mobile phones A mobile phone or cell phone is a portable telephone that allows users to make and receive calls over a radio frequency link while moving within a designated telephone service area, unlike fixed-location phones ( landline phones). This radio ...

. It is designed and optimised for affordable and low-power feature phones, while retaining access to Internet services through web apps, based on the

Gecko Geckos are small, mostly carnivorous lizards that have a wide distribution, found on every continent except Antarctica. Belonging to the infraorder Gekkota, geckos are found in warm climates. They range from . Geckos are unique among lizards ...

engine. KaiOS was originally forked from the former

Firefox OS Firefox OS (project name: ''Boot to Gecko'', also known as ''B2G'') is a discontinued Open-source software, open-source operating system made for smartphones, tablet computers, smart TVs, and Matchstick TV, dongles designed by Mozilla and exte ...

open-source project, and is developed by KaiOS Technologies (Hong Kong) Limited; a company based in

Hong Kong Hong Kong)., Legally Hong Kong, China in international treaties and organizations. is a special administrative region of China. With 7.5 million residents in a territory, Hong Kong is the fourth most densely populated region in the wor ...

, whose largest shareholder is Chinese electronics conglomerate

TCL Corporation TCL Technology Group Corp. (originally an abbreviation for Telecom Corporation Limited) is a Chinese partially state-owned electronics company headquartered in Huizhou, Guangdong province. TCL develops, manufactures, and sells consumer elect ...

.''''

Overview and features

KaiOS supports modern connectivity technologies like 4G LTE, VoLTE, GPS, and

Wi-Fi Wi-Fi () is a family of wireless network protocols based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards, which are commonly used for Wireless LAN, local area networking of devices and Internet access, allowing nearby digital devices to exchange data by ...

. KaiOS runs

HTML5 HTML5 (Hypertext Markup Language 5) is a markup language used for structuring and presenting hypertext documents on the World Wide Web. It was the fifth and final major HTML version that is now a retired World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommend ...

-based apps, supports over-the-air updates, and has a dedicated app marketplace called ''KaiStore''. Some applications are preinstalled onto the phone, including

Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...

and

YouTube YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim who were three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in ...

. , there are 500+ apps in KaiStore. The

mobile operating system A mobile operating system is an operating system used for smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, smartglasses, or other non-laptop personal mobile computing devices. While computers such as laptops are "mobile", the operating systems used on the ...

is comparatively lightweight on hardware resource usage, and is able to run on devices with just 256

megabyte The megabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. Its recommended unit symbol is MB. The unit prefix ''mega'' is a multiplier of (106) in the International System of Units (SI). Therefore, one megabyte is one million bytes ...

s (MB) of memory.

History

The operating system was first released in 2017, and is developed by KaiOS Technologies Inc., a

–based company headed by CEO Sebastien Codeville, with offices in other countries. In June 2018,

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

invested US$22 million in the operating system. That same year, India-based telecom operator Reliance Jio also invested $7 million through its sister concern, Reliance Retail for a 16% stake in the company. In May 2019, KaiOS raised an additional $50 million USD from Cathay Innovation, and previous investors Google and TCL Holdings. In market share study results announced in May 2018, KaiOS beat Apple's

iOS Ios, Io or Nio (, ; ; locally Nios, Νιός) is a Greek island in the Cyclades group in the Aegean Sea. Ios is a hilly island with cliffs down to the sea on most sides. It is situated halfway between Naxos and Santorini. It is about long an ...

for second place in

India India, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area; the List of countries by population (United Nations), most populous country since ...

, while Android dominates with 71%, albeit down by 9%. KaiOS growth is being largely attributed to the popularity of the competitively-priced JioPhone. In Q1 2018, 23 million KaiOS devices were produced. , KaiOS Technologies has partnered with

Mozilla Mozilla is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, publishes and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting free software and open standards. The community is supported institution ...

, Airfind, Avenir Telecom (Energizer),

Bullitt ''Bullitt'' is a 1968 American action thriller film directed by Peter Yates from a screenplay by Alan Trustman, Alan R. Trustman and Harry Kleiner and based on the 1963 crime novel ''Mute Witness'' by Robert L. Fish. It stars Steve McQueen, Ro ...

, Doro, HMD Global, Micromax, NXP, Spreadtrum,

Qualcomm Qualcomm Incorporated () is an American multinational corporation headquartered in San Diego, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. It creates semiconductors, software and services related to wireless techn ...

, Jio, Sprint,

AT&T AT&T Inc., an abbreviation for its predecessor's former name, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the w ...

T-Mobile T-Mobile is the brand of telecommunications by Deutsche Telekom Deutsche Telekom AG (, ; often just Telekom, DTAG or DT; stylised as ·T·) is a partially state-owned German telecommunications company headquartered in Bonn and the largest telec ...

, and Orange S.A. In March 2020,

and KaiOS Technologies announced a partnership to update KaiOS with a modern version of the Gecko browser engine, and more closely aligned testing infrastructure. This change should give KaiOS four years worth of performance and security improvements and new features, including TLS 1.3,

WebAssembly WebAssembly (Wasm) defines a portable binary-code format and a corresponding text format for executable programs as well as software interfaces for facilitating communication between such programs and their host environment. The main goal of ...

, WebGL 2.0, Progressive Web Apps, new

video codec A video codec is software or Computer hardware, hardware that data compression, compresses and Uncompressed video, decompresses digital video. In the context of video compression, ''codec'' is a portmanteau of ''encoder'' and ''decoder'', while ...

s like WebP, AV1, and modern

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior. Web browsers have ...

and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) features.

Devices

Devices that are installed with KaiOS include (KaiStore may not be included, if device vendor removed it): * Alcatel Go Flip (known as Cingular Flip 2 on

, Alcatel MyFlip on

TracFone Wireless TracFone Wireless, Inc. (TFWI) is an American wireless prepaid service provider. It is a mobile virtual network operator offering Prepaid mobile phone, prepaid and no-contract services on the Verizon (mobile network), Verizon network under multi ...

) and 3088X * Advan Hape Online (

Indonesia Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania, between the Indian Ocean, Indian and Pacific Ocean, Pacific oceans. Comprising over List of islands of Indonesia, 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, ...

) in partnership with

Indosat PT Indosat Tbk, trade name, trading as Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison, abbreviated as IOH, is an Indonesian telecommunications provider which is owned by Ooredoo Hutchison Asia, a joint venture between Ooredoo and Hutchison Asia Telecom Group (a part ...

Ooredoo. * Reliance Jio's JioPhone, F10Q, F101K, F120B, F220B, F211S, F221S, F250Y, F271I, F30C, F41T, F50Y, F61F, F81E, F90M, LF-2401, LF-2402, LF-2403, LF-2403N, all branded as LYF, JioPhone 2, F300B, F310B, JioPhone Lite, F320B, Prima 4G * HMD Global's

Nokia Nokia Corporation is a Finnish multinational corporation, multinational telecommunications industry, telecommunications, technology company, information technology, and consumer electronics corporation, originally established as a pulp mill in 1 ...

8110 4G, 2720 Flip, 800 Tough, 6300 4G, 8000 4G, Nokia 2760 Flip, 2780 Flip, and HMD's Barbie™ Phone (U.S. version). * Energizer Energy E220, E220S, E241, E241S, E242S and Hardcase H241, H242, H280S, E282SC * Doro 7050, 7060 *Cat B35 * Gigaset GL7 *Maxcom MK241, MK281 *WizPhone WP006, launched in Indonesia in partnership with

and Alfamart. * MTN 3G phone (MTN Smart S 3G) * Positivo P70S (Brazil) * Multilaser ZAPP (Brazil) * Tecno T901 *IKU V400 4G *I-Plus I4g *

Lava Lava is molten or partially molten rock (magma) that has been expelled from the interior of a terrestrial planet (such as Earth) or a Natural satellite, moon onto its surface. Lava may be erupted at a volcano or through a Fissure vent, fractu ...

Captain 11 3G *

Jazz Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Its roots are in blues, ragtime, European harmony, African rhythmic rituals, spirituals, h ...

Digit 4G (Pakistan) * Orange Sanza 2, Sanza XL *Kitochi 4G Smart * Vodacom Smart Kitochi (Vida), Vodacom Smart Kitochi (Azumi) * QMobile 4G Plus (Pakistan) *GeoPhone T15, T19, T19i (Made in India for Bangladesh) *Sigma mobile X-Style S3500 sKai (Ukraine) *Ghia KOX1, GK3G, GQWERTY (Mexico) *myPhone Up Smart, Up Smart LTE (Poland) *Symphony PD1 4G (Bangladesh) * BKAV C85 (Vietnam) in partnership with

Viettel The Military Industry and Telecoms Group (), Trade name, trading as Viettel or Viettel Group (), is a Vietnamese State-owned enterprise, state-owned multinational corporation, multinational telecommunications, technology and manufacturing C ...

. This is the only KaiOS device to not feature

support *Viettel V6504, V1207 (Vietnam). The Viettel V1207, one of the wireless home phones, runs KaiOS. * itel it9200 (China) * TCL Flip, Flip 3, Flip Pro and Flip 4. Other devices of TCL Flip series run Android with

user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine fro ...

similar to KaiOS. All KaiOS devices have T9 keypads, except the Jiophone 2 and Ghia GQWERTY, which have

QWERTY QWERTY ( ) is a keyboard layout for Latin-script alphabets. The name comes from the order of the first six Computer keyboard keys#Types, keys on the top letter row of the keyboard: . The QWERTY design is based on a layout included in the Sh ...

keypads.

Release history

Jailbreak

With the release of the Nokia 8110 4G, an active community (colloquially known as Banana Hackers) around both KaiOS and the phone arose and released the first version of a jailbreak. This gave users the ability to use apps outside KaiStore including old

apps on KaiOS devices, as well as flashing their devices with community-created ROMs, such as GerdaOS. Some models can also be rooted, giving the user further control over the device.

References

External links

* * {{Portal bar, Software, Hong Kong KaiOS 2017 software ARM operating systems Embedded Linux distributions Formerly open-source or free software Gecko-based software Linux distributions Mobile Linux Software that uses XUL