China has announced a new independent mobile operating system called COS, which is the country's first government-approved smartphone system.
China has unveiled its first native mobile operating system called COS, which simply stands for Chinese Operating System. The new mobile OS comes after a joint effort from Shanghai Liantong, ISCAS (Institute of Software at the Chinese Academy of Sciences) and the government. The new system is based on Linux and serves as an operating platform for computers, smartphones, tablets, set top boxes and extends support for HTML5 applications.
China's previous attempt to build an independent platform called OPhone was barely successful. But the nation wants to put an end to the foreign software rule. The COS will end the supremacy of Android, iOS and Windows Phone in China and offer native services through its new platform to smartphone users.
Like Android, the Chinese Operating System is an open source operating system and is developed "independently." The native platform will offer better localization as it focuses on solitary language input, speech recognition technology, cloud services and lot more, Engadget reports. According to the tech blog, Ming Tree, the director of ISCAS criticized foreign software including iOS for limited usability, while blaming Android and Windows Phone for their lack of security.
"Friends of the upstream and downstream work together to build the future of complete, open, active COS industrial environment, improve COS application of the ecosystem, and promote product diversification, meet or exceed the current mainstream operating system level," Chinese paper People.com quoted Tree as saying.
Engadget says that HTC might have been a big supporter of the project, but there has been no mention of HTC's involvement.
