Nokia’s KaiOS Finally has an Official Version of WhatsApp

Over the past year, WhatsApp Inc. worked incessantly to bring its WhatsApp Messenger app to other mobile operating systems, apart from the well-known Android and iOS, among others. One such operating system is KaiOS.

KaiOS was intended for feature phones

KaiOS is a mobile operating system owned by the US company KaiOS Technologies which made its first appearance in 2017. KaiOS is a fork for the discontinued Firefox OS which was an attempt to create an operating system by Firefox.

KaiOS’s aim was to become an operating system for feature phones as most of the best known OSs concentrate on smartphones. With the help of KaiOS, feature phones could use advanced technologies that were until recently available only to smartphones. Among the advanced technologies, we can point out the app stores and Wi-Fi/4G capabilities. One important feature of KaiOS is very long battery life.

Users can go to KaiStore to download applications, among which are apps like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and, more recently, WhatsApp.

KaiOS devices to come with pre-installed WhatsApp

Starting July 22^nd, WhatsApp will be available for seven KaiOS devices, the biggest release until now. The devices that have KaiOS are the Cat B35, Doro 7060, JioPhone (Reliance Jio), JioPhone 2 (Reliance Jio), MTN Smart, Nokia 8110 (HMD Global) and the Orange Sanza. The JioPhone versions were the first to receive the app as of September 2018 JioPhone users could message each other on WhatsApp. Nokia 8110 devices were the second to install the app in April 2019, but only in India.

WhatsApp can be installed from the KaiStore and by the end of the year KaiOS devices will have it pre-installed. The good news is that KaiOS devices support not only messaging but also calling, while the end-to-end encryption is still contained.

WhatsApp Inc.’s decision to make their app available to feature phones is to be saluted as such phones are much more necessary and indispensable than the new versions of smartphones in developing nations. For people in these nations, communication is vital and WhatsApp can help them in this matter.