Besides iOS and Android, what is the third largest mobile system in the world?

Today, more than 80 million devices run KaiOS, which is based on Firefox OS, and its market share is second only to the popular Android and iOS. So the question is, how did it become the world's third largest mobile operating system?

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An article in Engadget tells the history of KaiOS. KaiOS originated from TCL. The company's CEO Sebastien Codeville joined TCL in 2010 when TCL was developing Alcatel-branded mobile phones. After the birth of Firefox OS, TCL expressed its support for Firefox OS and launched mobile phones equipped with the system.

But Firefox OS failed to gain the attention that Mozilla had hoped for, and it announced in 2015 that it would terminate the project, with the next version launched in 2016. However, TCL still continues the project internally. Codeville saw the potential of Firefox OS, and believed that its failure was that it was defined as a smartphone, and it could not compete with the dominant Android ecosystem at the low end.

Codeville believed that Firefox OS should explore the feature phone market . Codeville founded a new company and poached Firefox OS developers from Mozilla and TCL to develop KaiOS for feature phones.

Smartphones represent the future, but the market for feature phones is still huge, with very cheap KaiOS phones costing less than $10 .