Feature phones — hope for developing countries

Feature phone is a category of devices located in the middle of the conditional division of modern mobile devices

• Dumb phones
• Feature phones
• Smart phones

They owe their appearance in their modern form to KaiOS, an operating system oriented for budget, push-button phones, which, according to the developers, should nevertheless provide the same communication functions as smartphones, namely social networks, messengers and, in general, work with web applications.
In this article, I propose to consider how the feature phones category looks today for the user and developer and assess the prospects of this market.

For the user

As I said above, unlike dumb phones, which proclaim digital austerity and for the most part the rejection of all kinds of services, feature phones also rely on the availability of services for everyone in any country of the world, but in my opinion they can also be useful as an alternative to a smartphone, because if the weather forecast remains in your phone and the messenger in which you communicate with your loved ones, but the endless social media feed will disappear, you will probably become a little more productive and freer :)

KaiOS can be called the founder of this class of devices, the system received funding and several major applications from Google, like Assistant and YouTube, its own app store and advertising network were also launched, an SDK for developers was presented and the system launched in many markets. It seemed that everything was ready and working fine, but for example, the latest line of Nokia phones came out on the S30+, although their past hits like the 8110 were released under the control of KaiOS. Users are dissatisfied with the number and intrusiveness of advertising, as well as the inability to update the operating system on many devices and install updated applications, because backward compatibility has disappeared with the platform update. Many believe that KaiOS is following the path of WindowsPhone, with the same promising, but closed model and the rejection of backward compatibility.

But in my opinion, the KaiOS experience can be considered successful, the system has shown the viability of the feature phones model, the interest of users and corporations.

For developers

Developers can try KaiOS now, there is a portal for developers, there you can find documentation, a development environment and an emulator. In my opinion, KaiOS has prospects, but the problem with backward compatibility of versions, the advertising network and a decrease in the share of new devices makes us think that for greater coverage and actual fulfillment of the task of a mass operating system for mobile devices in developing countries, we should proceed from the maximum openness of the system.

In my opinion, feature phones is a very promising area, it is also worth not forgetting about experiments with Android on push–button phones like Xiaomi Qin

Perhaps it would be worth trying to develop a simple launcher for Android that is suitable for push-button phones and the corresponding software, but projects of individual operating systems could simplify the entry threshold for both vendors and developers primarily from developing countries, because despite all kinds of data, key needs and the development of the high-tech sphere is possible only inside the market itself.