How to create apps for mobiles which are using KaiOS?

Question

I recently found in news that KaiOS has been used in 4G Volte Enabled feature mobile phones. I was wondering how to create apps for KaiOS. Any help on creating apps for KaiOS has been greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You can find the kickstart here https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/B2G_OS/Firefox_OS_apps/Building_apps_for_Firefox_OS but as KaiOS is B2G forked i would still suggest you to go to kaiOS official website to check the proper flow for the application development.

Below are the series of steps you need to go through if you don't want to get stuck in between of development:

• First you should understand how applications actually work in kaiOS environment and for that you need to first understand the architecture for that. You can give a read to https://developer.kaiostech.com/introduction/architecture for more understanding.

• Then comes setup for your application which you will find here at https://developer.kaiostech.com/environment-setup . Mozzila firefox shift+F8 will open the webIDE where you can see your devices connected but for that you should have proper drivers installed for your phone. You can use firefox emulator 2.2 (stable) as well for initial start.

• Now its time to have your first application onboard to kaiOS . You can make your application in any of the client specific JS like angular , react or even plain javascript but the important part is to have manifest.webapp in root folder for compatibility.You can give a read to https://developer.kaiostech.com/first-app.

• You are able to see your first application on your phone !! Now the real pain arrives when it comes to navigate through the application by keypad but thanks to naviboard library which will do this work for you to align your navigable items and navigate through it by simple API’s. You can find the library at https://github.com/amanboss9/naviboard.

• When you are done with navigation part of feature phone, you can go through and develop as much as you can as if it is a web application and can develop a lot of things.

• Check the sample project at https://github.com/amanboss9/kaios-angular-app. This Boilerplate can save lot of time when it comes to setting up everything from scratch.It included Angular1.6, naviboardJS(For auto handling navigation part of your application) and Gulp.