CloudMosa plans to release a cloud-powered Puffin OS and a smartphone via Kickstarter. It's based on Android, but more focus will be given on web apps, similar to KaiOS. Puffin boasts incredibly affordable phones that can outperform flagship Android devices since its phones offload computation to cloud servers.
To prove this, CloudMosa offers this benchmark on $100 phones. To reduce data usage, Puffin technology also compresses web pages. Though we're yet to see the success of this initiative, the attempts to go all-in on web apps have so far resulted to failure, including Firefox OS phones and the original iPhone. We should also mention that Chrome, on both mobile and desktop, already has a feature that compresses data.
Talking about higher performance due to cloud computing, the considerations include latency and throughput. Though cloud servers have the huge potential of outdoing any mobile chipset, you'll have to consider network delays as well, which could mean a delay in results.
According to OpenSignal, the average latency on AT&T's LTE network was 54.1ms (other US carriers were slower). That's slow for apps, but may be acceptable.
It's also a bad move for games either. If you have Google Stadia in mind, that's a different kind of tech. For one, its game servers are found along with the Internet provider's hardware in order to reduce latency.
But CloudMosa maintains its positivity on web apps. It argues that web apps install instantly and won't eat up storage. However, how much can you really spend for a 128GB microSD card though? Around $20 or less? That's not the major concern of the majority. Adding to latency issues, caching files to local storage equates to quicker boot up.
Another thing we're concerned about is the lack of monthly cost on Puffin OS's landing page. The Chrome-based browser on CloudMosa costs $2 a month. Admittedly, CloudMosa claims that its browser gets fixing security vulnerabilities faster than other vendors (Google, Mozilla, etc.), which explains the cost. But paid browsers are not a thing anymore, thanks to the launch of Firefox years ago.
So that's it - the OS can't simply be free of charge, partly because it's funded by venture capital. We'll have to wait for that to clear up, but until then, we have a lot of questions in mind.
As for the Kickstarter, CloudMosa offers a Founders Edition. It comes with a Smartphone with Puffin OS, though we're not sure if the OS can run on existing Android devices.
