Old-school phones have a place in the world; 600 million non-smartphones were shipped globally in 2017. Even in the smartphone-crazy US, 12 million of phones sold last year were feature phones.

At Mobile World Congress this year, I talked to Sebastien Codeville, CEO of Kai, which makes a HTML5-based OS for feature phones called KaiOS. It was originally based on part of the Firefox OS codebase, but that's neither here nor there. Kai was picked by Sprint, AT&T, and T-Mobile to provide an OS for flip phones running on 4G LTE networks, because older OSes don't support voice calling over LTE networks. (Verizon uses a crippled version of Android in its flip phones.)

The company has seen blazing success in India, where it was tapped by new all-4G carrier Reliance Jio to make the Jio Phone, an inexpensive bar phone selling at the rate of 350,000 a day that features a front-facing camera for 4G video calls, supports 22 languages, and has a set of custom entertainment apps.

"It's their only access to internet or television," Codeville said of Jio Phone owners. "It's their first screen."

Here at MWC, Kai announced that it's coming to Doro's senior-friendly 7060 (above) and Nokia's gimmicky 8110 feature phones, and that its HTML5-based app store will get Facebook apps and the Google Assistant. In the US, a fully featured KaiOS phone would give elderly flip-phone owners a great new way to see their grandkids' baby pictures and the ability to ask Google questions by voice. Later this year, Cat plans to launch a rugged feature phone running KaiOS.

"We have new devices with new form factors coming," Codeville said. "Not smartphones. We are really positioned on feature phones with better input mechanisms."

Those phones will have access to KaiOS's app store, to which developers will soon be able to submit packaged Web apps. "We are using a very standard Web API," Codeville said.

Carriers Can Spoil Everything

We already have two KaiOS phones in the US, the Alcatel Go Flip and the Jitterbug Flip, and we're getting a third, the Doro 7050, probably this summer. But here's a twist: they're lame implementations of the OS. They all lack the KaiOS app store, they aren't going to have the Google or Facebook apps, and the Go Flip is really sluggish.

In the case of Jitterbug and Alcatel, they're just running really early versions of the OS, and they haven't been updated. The Doro is being crippled at Consumer Cellular's request.

I reached out to Consumer Cellular to get an explanation, and CEO John Marick sent us a complete, thoughtful answer. I found it pretty depressing, though.

"We have offered flip phones that attempt to build in additional features and get feedback that it just confuses the menu system," he wrote. "Trying to add smartphone features to a flip or create a simplified overlay to an OS, generally does not work very well. And almost more importantly, we find most people turn to family, friends and even passers-by to ask questions or get feedback on their phone. When it is something out of the norm, people do not know how to help and generally offer the advice of, 'you should buy a phone like mine (an iPhone or Android).'"

That said, Consumer Cellular could add features back into the Doro 7050 if they found them "a benefit to our customers," Marick said.

I contacted Alcatel for comment about the Go Flip, but did not hear back. Kai can definitely push new versions of the OS to those phones, Codeville said. Kai has already delivered a new version of the OS to Alcatel, he said, and Doro is releasing a fully featured version of the 7050 (called the 7060) in Europe. But the carriers and phone makers have to agree.

"We partner with operators," Codeville said. "We can't be successful if we are not an operator partner."