@badrihippo@fosstodon.org
First time I hear about kaios.
Briefly looked into it.
How is it as a privacy phone? Is it bloated with big brother trash?
Does it support more privacy friendly communication systems like xmpp?

@raccoon well it's unfortunately not fully open source and does have some Big Tech stuff built in (Google Assistant, Maps)

There's a custom ROM called #GerdaOS specifically for the Nokia 8110 Bananaphone that is fully Free Software. There was also #ProjectPris for other phones but there's been no news on that for a while 🙁

Other two hurdles I think are app availability and sluggish hardware. As for #XMPP support...kind of, with #Convo, and I'm working on it 😉

https://git.disroot.org/badrihippo/convo

@raccoon I'm focusing on developing button-phone-friendly apps since that's what I can do and hoping that others will come up with a fully free OS and better hardware eventually 💭

Since it's HTML/JS based, the apps can easily be ported around. I've also heard of a #postmarketOS UI thing called #bananui which is "like #Phosh for button phones" but haven't got around to subjecting my phone to it yet

@badrihippo@fosstodon.org
Keep up the good work. The best would be a phone with no big tech garbage precooked into it but with the option to add it if needed.
For example,I sadly have to use whatsapp for work :(

@raccoon regarding WhatsApp, they used to support KaiOS but decided to drop support last February. Possibly one of the reasons people became interested in Convo. Since it's XMPP, #slidge should work but I don't know if that'd be functional enough for you?

In India the main barrier is banking and payment apps which are increasingly locked down and usually don't run if your phone is rooted, let alone trying a custom ROM or something like #Waydroid. Of course, they only support Android and iOS 😕

@badrihippo@fosstodon.org
That sucks.
I don't get why banking apps are seen as so important, can't people just use the website?

@raccoon here there's this payment system "everyone" uses called UPI that involves scanning QR codes. No technical reason that can't happen on a website too, but the company running it decided it was a good idea to require an app and also enforce things like insertion of a SIM card matching the phone number registered with your bank, and enabling location on all transactions. Besides making it difficult for non-mainstream devices it's something of a privacy nightmare 😣

@raccoon also side note, a lot of websites with fancy JavaScript and/or non-responsive pages, i.e. most banking sites in India, won't be usable on KaiOS. That's an easier problem to solve though

@badrihippo Are you sure that GerdaOS *is* a custom ROM as opposed to that it *was* a custom ROM? I do not find any activity around it anymore and gerda.tech is dead?

@SpaciousCoder78 @raccoon ah yes, I don't think UPI is going away any time soon but if it did I'd be very happy 😛

My main use-case is that in some cities (looking at you Bangalore; at least the parts of it I end up at) it's very hard to get change and I either have to carry lots of it around or have a mini argument each time and maybe end up paying extra 🙁

@SpaciousCoder78 @raccoon fortunately for me, the #UPI process is cumbersome enough on #KaiOS I don't end up overspending. Small mercies 🤪

@josch oh shucks, when did *that* happen 😱

The archive seems to be still there; not sure about the ROM but hopefully that's there too:

https://archive.luxferre.top/gerdaos

I might still say "is" in the sense it's as in-the-present as the Nokia 8110 is. Things move slow in the KaiOS world 🐢 🫠

@erebion ah shucks, my bad for not fact checking. You're right, I see some blobs in the GerdaOS repo and also no licence specified.

https://gitlab.com/project-pris/system

I forget sometimes that not all hacker things (even if privacy focused) are open source 😣

By the way, TIL there's some sort of port of PicoLisp!

https://gitlab.com/project-pris/picolisp-8110-port

@raccoon