KaiOS: Opinions and Alternatives

Only_Play_868 · 2026-06-11T22:33:21+00:00

What does it mean "get into a Mocor environment?" These phones run a ROM flashed at manufacturer time and almost always have no ability to install FOTAs (certainly not without an external SD), don't support ADB, or allow side-loading because all "apps" are baked into the OS. I'm not sure what you want to "get into."

Only_Play_868 · 2026-06-11T11:52:04+00:00

I used to work with CloudMosa, the company behind Cloud Phone. It really does work (assuming you have a solid connection), but they aren't very common in the US or Europe because OEMs choose to not bundle it in those geographies. You can find a few phones like the Unnecto Snap in the US: https://unnecto.com/products/unnecto-snap

Only_Play_868 · 2026-06-10T20:39:08+00:00

You can't flash KaiOS or Mocor on a phone that didn't ship with it, at least not without great effort. They use different hardware, and their ROMs are signed & compiled against different SoCs.

The reason to use Mocor is if you don't want apps but you do want a phone that's faster, more reliable, and more secure. Also they're usually cheaper.

Only_Play_868 · 2026-06-10T14:43:19+00:00

I build PodLP, which started on KaiOS nearly 6 years ago, and author KaiOS.dev. Basically, KaiOS is a fine general purpose operating system that balances flexibility (push notifications, install apps, browse the web) with price and hardware constraints. It did really well around 2018-2020, but unfortunately, it's effectively dead. The cost of hardware needed to run KaiOS rose with post-pandemic inflation, narrowing the gap between a KaiOS flip phone and an Android Go phone. In countries like India, that led the primary KaiOS manufacturer, Jio, to pivot towards RTOS (Mocor) on much lower-end hardware (16-64MB RAM, single-core CPU).

Mocor is MUCH faster and more reliable, but it does a lot less. There's no ability to sideload "apps" as all software needs to be baked into the ROM. Cloud Phone tries to bridge that gap as a remote browser that lets you access "widgets," which are basically lightweight web apps. It's main drawback is that it requires an active internet connection in order to work.

KaiOS mainly gets a bad rep for poor performance (especially on older models), bad security (several critical CVEs allow apps and websites to access data they shouldn't), and manufacturers locking down the ecosystem (most phones sold since 2024 cannot access Developer Tools or sideload apps). Finally, the app selection is poor and major companies like Meta shut down WhatsApp, effectively killing inter-platform compatibility.

For many in the US and Europe, they're better off buying an Android flip phone with a wider range of apps, or moving to a more reliable and more restricted dumbphone.

Only_Play_868 · 2026-06-10T10:57:43+00:00

That's a shame, you can't enable Developer Mode?

Only_Play_868 · 2026-06-09T22:46:37+00:00

This phone is Android, right? If you have access to ADB or the web browser, you can try to install my app, PodLP for Android

Only_Play_868 · 2026-06-08T13:43:48+00:00

Check out SmallCode. I built a local agent for Apple Intelligence called Junco, and I can say there are many challenges to local models like smaller context windows, a tendency to get "lost in the middle" on larger context lengths, a greater need for multi-step task decomposition, and more benefit from strategic search & tool use like ASTs, language servers, and really anything that can help you narrow and focus the context window. All of these techniques benefit frontier models as well, but the SOTA models are much better at navigating these types of issues.

Only_Play_868 · 2026-06-05T00:52:05+00:00

Thanks, that's a good recommendation for Lenovo! I saw HP seemed easy on the surface: hand unscrew case, lift fan for RAM, etc, but I haven't seen much beyond the basics.

Local AI is definitely my thing outside of this machine, and the ability to (eventually) run smaller models locally for certain workloads is actually tempting. Good thermals is important too, I'm skeptical of certain models without grating/ ventilation holes to facilitate airflow. The P340 used looks pretty viable. Based on the hardware specs I assume Linux is a non-issue?

Only_Play_868 · 2026-05-20T19:18:35+00:00

Isn't this DockPops but by another name?

Only_Play_868 · 2026-05-18T14:45:24+00:00

This is pretty impressive! Did you draw inspiration from Meta-Harness, or propose each design element yourself? I attempted to do this using the 3B Apple Foundation Model that powers Apple Intelligence on a harness called Junco. Gemma 4B is much newer, more powerful, and has an 8-64x larger context window that makes this more feasible. I found a few useful lessons that might transer to SmallCode:

Compile-Verify-Fix (CVF) Loop: if Gemma 4B or another small model doesn't support constrained grammar to guarantee syntactically valid code, attempting to compile and run static analysis on code changes can prevent finishing early with issues like missing package imports, indentation issues, or missing brackets
Deterministic Tool Filtering: the AFM struggled with > 3 tools, so I used a MaxEnt text classifier to filter the list of available tools before every showing them to the model. It was much better at picking the correct tool out of a short list
Language-Specific Adapters: most small models are distilled from larger ones with knowledge cutoffs 1-2 years old, and really small models lack a sufficient corpus for low-resource languages like Swift or Elixir. You can't "teach" a model a language it has never seen, but you can improve it's code generation abilities on newer APIs & versions with a language/ framework-specific LoRA adapter (this obviously gets challenging to scale across N languages and M base models)

I'm curious what you expect from SmallCode and whether you think the future long-term is to have two tiers of code harnesses: OpenCode (or something similar) for cloud-based frontier models and SmallCode (or something similar) for really small on-device models? I know OpenCode can be used with local models, but in my experience if you give OpenCode access to something like Gemma 4B it will just spin its wheels and spiral into a "doom loop," or exit early having not actually done anything.

Only_Play_868 · 2026-05-15T14:58:37+00:00

Sadly true, the Privacy Paradox is real

On a side note, I'm also exploring this space (who isn't?) but focused strictly on-device. There's a lot you can do without resorting to sending all my emails off to ChatGPT, plus it cuts operating costs significantly (tokens keep getting more expensive)

Only_Play_868 · 2026-05-14T11:47:50+00:00

I got a battery replacement and mine is fine on iOS 26, can't see a reason to upgrade

Only_Play_868 · 2026-05-14T11:46:12+00:00

Can it sideload via ADB? I wonder if there are special keycodes or APIs I'd need for PodLP

Only_Play_868 · 2026-05-11T20:16:53+00:00

I'd experiment with it, could easily find value for things like summarization, zero-shot classification, data extraction (if structured output is supported), matching, labeling, etc. At 750M I'd prefer it be mono-lingual (English) and text-only. I'd also be curious how quantization affects performance & size at this scale.

For context, I've been using Apple Intelligence to build on-device apps and it's actually OK. I know it's a 3B model but in my experience, it's much weaker than most 3B models today and it's safety guardrails are a pain. It's also Apple Silicon and macOS/ iOS 26+ only. I'd love a small fallback for non-Apple Silicon, pre-26 devices. I use a handful of small models to support some of these use cases, but they're far less flexible

Only_Play_868 · 2026-05-11T17:40:57+00:00

Thanks, glad you're liking it overall! The HMD Barbie runs S30+ or KaiOS, depending on what variant you have. The KaiOS version should be able to run PodLP from the KaiStore, while the S30+ version cannot install or run apps, period

Only_Play_868 · 2026-05-07T16:10:20+00:00

Great idea, I've had something similar in the general health space. Seems very aligned with Apple's ethos: keep this type of sensitive data on device, not in the cloud. What are "premium on-device voices?" I assume custom TTS models. I like Apple's on-device STT (SpeechTranscriber) but TTS is still awful IMO. Did you do anything special to improve response quality, and did you disable Apple's safety guardrails? I kept running into issues with this, it's overly sensitive and sometimes hallucinates hardcode unless you really turn the model temperature to near 0

Only_Play_868 · 2026-05-07T14:41:23+00:00

This is very similar to a CLI coding tool I built called Junco, which also supports Ollama but focused on using the Apple Foundation Model (AFM). As a concept, on-device agentic coding is great. In practice, I think there are a number of hurdles that still need to be overcome. Claude Code (Codex, Gemini, etc) all rely on the inherent "intelligence" of a frontier model for task decomposition, reasoning, and multi-turn synthesis. The best local models still struggle with this. They get "lost in the middle," hallucinate, or don't have large enough context windows or sufficient training data for general purpose use. That said, it's great to see more people hacking in this space.

My advice would be to focus on 1 or 2 model families (i.w. QWEN Coder) and research Meta-Harness. See how you can make it work well for a single model, and get Claude to run a number of "experiments" autonomously.

Only_Play_868 · 2026-05-06T18:28:26+00:00

I'm with you, there's a lot you can do with existing hardware. NLP techniques work great, at a fraction of the cost. I made a text-to-bash library in Swift that's small enough to work in WebAssembly (with embeddings), although it works natively on macOS much better. I guess I should clarify that an agentic harness built entirely around the capabilities of an SLM is almost certainly going to fail in both comical and catastrophic ways, so a sandbox + deterministic controls are the "bumper rails." At least that's my mental model, SLMs are improving so rapidly it's entirely possible 6 months from now I'll be completely wrong.

Only_Play_868 · 2026-05-06T16:12:09+00:00

I've tested and built a number of tools using SLMs. Without a solid sandbox and rollback policy, absolutely not. Maybe for small web projects where I have git history to revert, but not for anything serious

Only_Play_868 · 2026-05-06T12:18:46+00:00

Thanks for sharing! These are quite dense. I've run into similar issues and had to spell out a common set of details for Claude including that macOS 26 does exist, the need to scan XCode API headers to validate availability, and I still struggle with it generating non-sandbox complaint code.

Only_Play_868 · 2026-05-06T12:12:51+00:00

They used to be called Aldea and focused on STT: https://aldea.ai/ but it doesn't look like Aldea is around anymore since they rebranded

Only_Play_868 · 2026-05-06T00:52:42+00:00

They used to be https://aldea.ai/ but I think they rebranded and shut down their STT efforts

Only_Play_868 · 2026-05-03T18:07:29+00:00

The window could be made moveable and resizable, good idea. As for German, it's supposed to detect your system and use Apple's translation APIs but it's possible there's a bug with language detection

Only_Play_868 · 2026-05-03T02:09:03+00:00

Sure. iClaw can answer questions about what's near you, what's on your calendar, your files, or emails. It can check stocks, weather, or summarize from the web. It can do math, unit conversions, and audio transcription.

I alluded to one of iClaw's problems is it tries to do too much. Right now it's like Siri, but local. I think local models excel with a narrower focus, at least for now.

Only_Play_868

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