As I mentioned briefly, some posts ago, I gave up on working on VR for Meta as a contractor, not because of anything they were doing wrong, but because I completely lost interest in what Meta is doing and in the potential right now for their flavor of VR. I think I don’t need to explain any further than that.
But I wanted to make a new post about a positive and profitable direction I think I can take my skills, that will leverage all of the UX (user experience) stuff I learned working on the T-Mobile Sidekick phones in the mid ’00s, but with modern 4G LTE radio technology, and with a wide-open space for development: KaiOS.
KaiOS is relevant because Nokia is using it on their feature phones which are at the level of capability just below basic Android phones. It’s a descendant of Firefox OS that runs Web apps in a browser engine. Not my most favorite environment, but not my least favorite, either.
If you really had your heart set on writing the best Snake game for KaiOS, you’ll have a lot of competition, but if you want to write something non-obvious, you may just find that nobody else has released the app idea you’re thinking of on the KaiOS Store.
If you only looked at the big carriers’ stores for phones, you wouldn’t realize that the feature flip phone category still exists, except now the phones use modern 4G radio technology and run web apps written to this KaiOS format. If you go to the KaiOS Explore Devices page, there are a ton of phones that all look like they traveled here straight from 2009. Which is what you want, right?
This type of phone is becoming extremely popular among gen Z and even people up to my age who want fewer distractions. There are simpler phones for the very elderly, who can barely manage dialing and SMS, but for most people who aren’t suffering from cognitive decline but want a phone that’s not capable of running apps that are “too tempting” and want to spend under $50, with a prepaid minutes plan, KaiOS is the phone OS they’re going to end up with, probably on a Nokia (HMD Global) flip phone, so I may as well profit from it.
Update: I Googled “Nokia 2760 User Guide” and got through 40 or 50 pages of the user manual wondering why it sounded like it was written in 2007, before realizing, oh, they reused the model number from a phone that came out in 2007. The manual for the “Nokia 2760 Flip” was written in the current decade.
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