This video was sponsored by Brilliant.
You might have seen this phone before.
It's the famous Nokia Banana phone.
But what you might not know is that this phone is running KaiOS, which is actually shaping up to become
the third major mobile operating system in the world after iOS and Android.
So in the 36th episode of the Story Behind series, let me explain what exactly KaiOS is,
and why Google has just invested 22 million dollars into a seeming competitor
of its own Android.
So KaiOS calls itself the Emerging OS, which I think is a perfect description.
It's an OS that makes feature phones, or what we used to call dumb phones, kind of smart.
It adds 4G, WiFi and GPS capabilities, mobile payments through NFC an app store
and a lot more.
And where all the other budget smartphone projects like Mozilla's FireFoxOS, Samsung's
Tizen and Google's Android One/Android Go had lukewarm reception,
KaiOS seems tobe a giant hit so far.
It launched in 2017 with an obscure Alcatel flip phone and was quickly picked up by HMD
for the Nokia Banana phone, Reliance Industries, a gigantic Indian conglomerate for the Jio
Phone, which is a 4G phone that came to dominate Indian feature phone sales in just one year,
Doro, a Swedish phone for senior users and many more.
The latest data I could find showed that KaiOS has already overtaken iOS as the 2nd most popular
mobile OS in India, globally already 40 million phones have been sold running KaiOS and the
company claims to be on track to hit the 100 million mark by the end of 2018.
Even the KaiOS store seems like a runaway success, as it has many of the most important
apps like WhatsApp, Twitter, YouTube and even the Google Assistant.
By any measure, KaiOS is growing exponentially.
So to understand its success, we first have to take a look at the OS itself.
KaiOS is actually a modified version of FireFoxOS, which was Mozilla's own, fully functional
modern smartphone OS built for touchscreen phones.
FireFoxOS to phones is kind of whatChromeOS is to PCs.
It has a Linux Kernel on top of which runs a browser, in this case FireFox, that is made
to look like an OS, and can obviously browse the web, and not only open websites, but also
web-apps that can pretend to be native apps.
Mozilla abandoned the project in 2016, since the adoption rate of FireFoxOS was quite slow,
but Mozilla being Mozilla, obviously also opensourced the whole OS, so after they abandoned
it, KaiOS picked it up, modified the UI to be better suited for feature phones with physical
keyboards, stripped it down even further, to the point where it can run on reeeeally
low-end hardware, slapped a few first party apps like a news reader and weather on the
device, together with the KaiOS store for 3rd party apps and voila, KaiOS was born.
And this approach has a few really significant benefits.
First, it being browser-based means getting apps on this platform is actually quite easy.
KaiOS uses standard web technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript,
and apparently there isn't even a need for wrappers.
Now, KaiOS has been quite strict about who they let into the app store, because they
want to make sure that only optimized apps get in there that have their excessive background data syncing
and excessive animations turned off, understandable, but anyone who has
a halfway decent mobile website, basically has a halfway decent KaiOS app ready as well.
And Second, there are significant cost savings.
Not only did the team not have to build an OS from scratch, through which they saved
a ton of money, they also designed KaiOS to be able to save on component costs as well.
Their phones don't need a touchscreens, which, according to them, are the most expensive
components of the average smartphone, they only require 256 MB of storage, and run not
only on Qualcomm chips, but also on those from Spreadtrum, a budget chipmaker from China.
So KaiOS hardware doesn't have to be, but can be super cheap.
This Nokia 8810 is the only phone with KaiOS I could buy here in Germany for the demo,
but price-wise it's actually the worst example, as it costs 79 Euros.
That puts it pretty much into an entry level smartphone category, I made a whole video
explaining this phone, you can watch it right here, but anyway, the better example, at least
price-wise, is the Jio Phone from India.
This 4G phone is given away to consumers basically for free with Jio's 4G plans,
which seam ridiculously cheap.
1GB a month for the equivalent of $0.75, or 42GB a month for the equivalent of $2.35.
Which, uh, let's just say makes me a little envious.
And so the combination of being way more affordable than budget smartphones and yet having
way more advanced functionality than feature phones means that a whole
new group of people can suddenly get online for the first time.
A very large group of people.
Well, over 450 million feature phones were sold in 2017, and after many years of declining
sales, last year, the feature phone industry started growing again, just as smartphone
sales are flattening.
Especially India and Africa have seen big increases, so feature phones are a huge market
that's actually growing.
Now, traditionally, mobile carriers have been pretty unhappy about people using feature phones.
Because not only can they not sell expensive data packages to them every month,
which is basically their whole business model,
but, these phones usually also rely on old, outdated technologies like 2G and 3G.
So these carriers have to maintain and keep updating their old legacy networks,
when in reality they would just much rather focus on 4G and maybe even 5G.
But KaiOS can kind of help them with both of those issues.
They have 4G support, including voice over LTE calling, so carriers don't need
to support 2G and 3G networks for KaiOS users, and carriers can finally charge feature phone users
for mobile internet access, which they love to do so much.
Now, KaiOS still points to research that suggests their users in emerging markets won't be able
to pay more than 2.5 USD a month for the connection, but hey, that's still a lot better than what carriers
had before.
So that's the business side of it, but one question still remains.
What on earth is Google doing here?
And why have they invested $22 million into KaiOS when it is pretty obviously a competitor to
Google's two consumer facing platforms, Android and Chrome.
Cause remember, this is not only a mobile OS, it's essentially also a Firefox browser.
And why does Google develop apps like the Google Assistant for what is still a very
small platform?
Well, I will have to speculate here, but I do have a few ideas:
So when faced with a competitor, Google can have two different approaches.
Approach one is to use its quasi monopoly to try to kill the competitor before they become
too successful, like it did with Windows Phone or like it's doing with Amazon's platform right now.
Google never brought their services to the Windows Phone platform and actively fought
companies who made third-party clients for them.
They are now doing very similar things with the Echo and FireTV platforms, where they are
trying to keep YouTube off these devices with all their might.
The thinking is: people really want Google services, and denying a platform quality access
to them can be deadly for the platform.
On the other hand, with platforms it doesn't want to or can't kill, like iOS and KaiOS,
Google does the opposite.
It floods these platforms with Google services, and in KaiOS even with a financial investment,
to try to control as many user interactions on them as possible.
You know, if you can't beat them, join them.
Google can, simply put, buy its way into this new mobile company.
So even if in a couple of years it will become a major platform like I think it will,
Google will be there to not only control it, but also profit off of it.
Also, KaiOS has two exciting promises for Google.
First, a focus on the web.
And sure, it's currently based on FireFox, but Google basically owns half the web anyway
and KaiOS apps are essentially progressive web apps, which Google wants to establish
as the new web standard.
If progressive web apps succeed on KaiOS, they will be beneficial for both Android and
Chrome as well.
And second, KaiOS is a perfect place for the Google Assistant.
Yes, believe it or not, voice is a huge hit on KaiOS.
Which kinda makes sense if you think about it.
The number pad isn't exactly a great input method, plus feature phone users are often
less comfortable with navigating complex visual UIs and a disproportional amount of them are
even illiterate.
So voice is a big deal here.
The JioPhone has a prominent voice assistant button on it that launches their very own
Jio Assistant, and that one alone has served over 200 million voice commands already, so
obviously Google wants to attack this market.
Alright, before I wrap it up, there are a few things I'm not so fond of when it comes to KaiOS.
First of all, they took what is essentially open source code and turned it into a very closed,
locked down ecosystem, which is not my favourite thing ever.
Second, I am not sure I like Google becoming a bigger monopoly by gobbling up smaller platforms
that could challenge it in some way, not a big fan of that.
And third, this operating system, at least on this hardware, if you try to use heavy,
unoptimized websites like, I don't know, the Verge for example, is basically unusable.
But other than that, pretty cool project!
I think Google investing into KaiOS is a super smart move.
If played well, it means that hundreds of millions of people who experience the internet
for the first time will do so using Google services.
I'm actually surprised that Facebook or Microsoft, who have always wanted to have their own mobile
OS didn't jump on the opportunity in quite the same way, but hey, Google did, and while
I'm personally not personally super happy about their monopoly growing ever bigger,
I do have to admit that they were pretty damn smart for doing it.
Now, Google being smart about mobile operating systems shouldn't really come as a surprise
as they actively deal with them every day, and after all, it's practice that makes perfect.
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