KaiOS

KaiOS is a mobile operating system, based on Linux, for keypad feature phones. It is developed by KaiOS Technologies (Hong Kong) Limited; a company based in Kowloon, Hong Kong, with largest shareholder being Chinese multinational electronics conglomerate TCL Corporation. KaiOS is forked from B2G OS (Boot to Gecko OS), an open source community-driven fork of Firefox OS, which was discontinued by Mozilla in 2016.
The primary features of KaiOS bring support for 4G LTE E, VoLTE, GPS, and Wi-Fi; with HTML5-based apps and longer battery life to non-touchscreen devices with optimised user interface, less memory and energy consumption. It also features over-the-air updates (OTA updates). A dedicated app marketplace (KaiStore) enables users to download mobile applications, or 'apps'. Some services are preloaded as HTML5 applications, including Facebook and YouTube. , there are 500+ apps in KaiStore. The mobile operating system is comparatively lightweight on hardware resource usage, and is able to run on devices with just 256 megabytes (MB) of memory.
The operating system first appeared in , and is developed by KaiOS Technologies Inc., a Kowloon, Hong Kong-based company headed by CEO Sebastien Codeville, with offices in other countries. In June 2018, Google invested US$22 million in the operating system. India-based telecom operator Reliance Jio also invested $7 million for a 16% stake in the company. In May 2019, KaiOS raised an additional US$50 million from Cathay Innovation, and previous investors Google and TCL Holdings.
In market share study results announced in May 2018, KaiOS beat Apple's iOS for second place in India, while Android dominates with 71%, albeit down by 9%. KaiOS growth is being largely attributed to the popularity of the competitively-priced Jio phone. In Q1 2018, 23 million KaiOS devices were released.
In March 2020, Mozilla 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, WebGL 2.0, Progressive Web Apps, new video codecs like WebP, AV1, and modern JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) features.
Devices.
Devices that are installed with KaiOS are:
Partnerships.
, KaiOS Technologies has partnered with Mozilla, Airfind, Facebook, Google, Bullitt, Doro, HMD Global, Micromax, NXP, Spreadtrum, Qualcomm, Jio, Sprint, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Orange S.A.
In March 2020, KaiOS Technologies partnered with Mozilla to bring the modern version of Gecko browser engine to future KaiOS builds.
Jailbreak.
With the release of the Nokia 8110 4G, an active community around both KaiOS and the phone arose and released the first version of a jailbreak. This gave users the ability to use old Firefox OS apps on KaiOS devices, as well as flashing their devices with community-created ROMs, such as GerdaOS.