KaiOS is a mobile operating system based on Linux, developed by KaiOS Technologies Limited, a company based in Kowloon, Hong Kong, with largest shareholder being Chinese multinational electronics conglomerate TCL Corporation. It is forked from B2G 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-touch devices with optimized user interface, less memory and energy consumption. It also features over-the-air updates. A dedicated app marketplace enables users to download applications. Some services are preloaded as HTML5 applications, including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. On 1st April 2020 there are 500+ apps in KaiStore. The operating system is comparatively lightweight on hardware resource usage, and is able to run on devices with just 256 MB of memory. The operating system first appeared in 2017 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 in cash for a 16% stake in the company. 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 popularity of the competitively-priced Jio Phone. In Q1 2018, 23 million KaiOS devices were shipped. In March 2020 Mozilla and KaiOS Technologies announced partnership to update KaiOS with a modern version of Geckobrowser engine and closer align testing infrastructure. This change should give KaiOS 4 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 CSS features. KaiAds is an end-to-end programmatic advertising platform supporting the OpenRTB protocol. KaiOS is also the name of an unrelated Linux project, dating from 2014 and targeted at embedded systems. KaiPay V1 allows end users to purchase premium apps from KaiStore and to complete in-app purchases in the Wallpapers Store. KaiPay V2 will be more widely available and will provide greater coverage and additional methods of payment.
With the release of the Nokia8110 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 .
Partnerships
As of February 2018, KaiOS Technologies has partnered with Mozilla, Airfind, Facebook, Google, Twitter, 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 build.
