Well, I successfully pushed my first test app to my new $20 Nokia 2760 Flip phone using the KaiOS App Store submission portal. The app is just the sample To-Do app from GitHub (next-sample-vanilla) with the app name changed and with my name and URL added as the developer (otherwise, the portal won’t accept the .zip file I created because of the missing developer fields).
BTW, the “-x” option to “zip” goes after the directory to include, in this case “.”, since I’m inside of “next-sample-vanilla” when I created the .zip file:
zip -9r ../next-sample-vanilla.zip . -x '.git/*' -x .gitignore
That way I’m not including a bunch of unnecessary Git repo files. After uploading the app, I had to hunt around for the “Test Device” link, which isn’t in an obvious place (it’s the purple bar just below the version and status line when you go to App Detail and then expand the entry for the version of the app to test). After adding the IMEI of my test phone, and waiting a few minutes, the app did indeed show up in the KaiOS app store in the category I selected, and loaded and installed with no trouble.
It’s unfortunate that I can’t use adb on this locked phone, but now I know there’s nothing standing in the way of writing any app the phone can handle, including WebAssembly. I wish I were fluent in Rust, but I’m not, so I’m going to use C++.
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