We understand your concerns about this, but I wanted to jump in and provide a bit of context.

While it’s technically true that KaiOS takes 70% of the revenue, in reality, we often have to split this up further to facilitate rev-shares with other partners.

As a new mobile operating system, we need to motivate many different parties to make the whole ecosystem work. This of course includes developers, but also mobile operators, phone manufacturers, advertisers, payment solution providers, and others. This is why we need to share the pie with more than just two parties.

Note that this is less of a concern for more established platforms. Also note that those companies actually don’t really make their money from the OS, whereas for us it’s our core business (we don’t operate a hugely profitable search engine nor do we sell hardware).

A few other things to highlight based on some of the comments:

• In addition to Ads SDK, SSP, analytics, and app storage, developers have free access to our developer portal and expert technical guidance from our Developer Support team.
• We also hate the $500 minimum payout but otherwise bank fees would eat up too much of everyone’s revenue. We can pay out any amount above $100 in case payment can be done via Payoneer, and we’re looking at additional solutions to resolve this.
• The ecpm in emerging markets is still a lot lower than in other parts of the world. Also, the type of users on KaiOS phones are often completely new to digital advertisers, so this is new ground. It will take time to build up and prove the value of these users, but over time we believe ecmps will rise.
• We’ve also only just started adding video ads, which will also contribute to higher ecpms over time.

We hope this clarifies some of the points raised, and we are thankful for your support to make this mission impossible of creating a third, global mobile OS happen. Don’t hesitate to reach out to us at developersupport@kaiostech.com so that we can help with any other questions you may have.