The operating system KaiOS is dedicated to be run on simple smart phones. It is in full development and new applications appear regularly.
Orange proposes the following 3 applications:
- Minikey which provides a command line interface to send and receive keyboard events to and from KaiOS devices, by using low level OS interface libevdev. Using a T9 keyboard on KaiOS device can be fastidious. Minikey permits to facilitate user tests and test automation by simulating physical keyboard events. You can also record keyboard events and then replay them automatically as you wish.
See demo.
- react-keyboard-navigation, a React component to manage the navigation in a KaiOS application using a declarative and component-based approach.
Indeed, navigation is the key “battlefield” when developing a non-touch mobile application, as on KaiOS smart feature phones. The preferred method of app navigation for the user is to interact with a D-pad. In this context, it is necessary to identify the navigation elements (clickable elements), to make every element focusable (tabIndex="0"), to handle the keydown or keyup event and to apply the focus to the desired DOM element (element.focus()).
- KaiOS agent for OpenSTF, in an ongoing effort to provide an agent functionally equivalent to apk. While STFService targets Android devices only, this one monitors and performs various actions on a KaiOS device. This is basically a server written in C++ implementing the same protocol as OpenSTF (based on protobuf).
All three applications were published under open source licences: Apache v2.0 (Minikey, KaiOS agent) and MIT (react-keyboard-navigation).