Remote Browsers and the Feature Phone Market with Tom Barrasso

Tom Barrasso (00:00) Yeah, talking roughly around 200 million feature phones are sold worldwide every year, nearly 3 million in the United States alone, which is surprising to many folks. Now, the spectrum basically starts with Cloud Phone at the very bottom. So you have the most affordable device category, which sells the majority of the devices. The cheapest Cloud Phone today is about $12 US, which is why this device category is so popular.

Maxi Ferreira (00:21) Mm-hmm.

Tom Barrasso (00:23) millions of people around the world cannot afford something more expensive, let alone whatever the iPhone 16 Pro Ultra with 10 cameras

Maxi Ferreira (00:36) Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Frontend FM podcast. My name is Maxi Ferreira and my guest today is Tom Barasso. Tom is the head of developer relations for Cloud Phone at CloudMosa which is a company that is bridging the digital divide for the next billion users with cloud technologies. One of those technologies is Cloud Phone, which I’m very excited to dive into today with Tom who…

By the way, he’s also the creator of PodLP, which is the leading podcasting app for flip phones with over 10 million installs. Tom, thank you so much for joining me today. How are you?

Tom Barrasso (01:16) Thank you very much for having me. I am great.

Maxi Ferreira (01:18) Awesome. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for coming to the pod. I’m very much looking forward to our chat today because this is a topic that I know nothing about the feature phone market and flip phones and this lower end devices. It’s a completely new world for me. So I have a ton of questions. Not a lot of those questions would be very smart. But before we get into any of that, can you give us an introduction to who you are? What’s your

journey being into tech and what led you to working at CloudMosa

Tom Barrasso (01:49) Yeah, absolutely. So I started on software pretty young, probably around middle school building websites, and then high school I started building Android apps. And this was the really early days of Android. So I was building on the original mode of RollerDroid, if anyone remembers that. It was a great time to be a dev, I felt like, because first of all, every device was dev enabled, so you could just sideload apps all you wanted. Google Play, actually I don’t think it was called Google Play back then, but anyway, was the wild west of app development.

And yeah, my first app was Status Bar Plus. It was a Status Bar replacement app. So I figured out a technique using the Window Manager API in Android to draw over the system Status Bar. So it made it look like you had a different design. I copied Windows Phone 7 at the time because I love the Metro UI. So it’s clever and it was actually successful. Again, I knew nothing about marketing. I knew nothing about what made for a successful app. I just put it out there for like 99 cents and made like some real money, especially by high school standards.

And so then I put out a couple more apps. Eventually I worked at a couple of different startups, digital agencies, and then found my way into big tech. And yeah, it was around the pandemic that I sort of had this trajectory shift towards feature phones. I wanted to disconnect and my girlfriend was joking and saying, you know, can’t, there’s this trend in digital detoxers where a lot of people are now switching from smartphones to dumb phones because they want to get away from social media.

And I said, okay, I’m not ready to commit to getting rid of my smartphone, but I will try it out on camping trips. I’ll go to one, get one of these dumb phones. She said, no, you can’t do that. You listen to podcasts too much. There’s no way because there’s no podcast app, you’re not going to be able to do this. And so I just built the first podcast app for the platform at the time it was KaiOS. I launched it, you know, during the pandemic, a few months after lockdown, and it was actually very successful. It had a much wider market than I could have imagined.

And now here we are nearly five years later and Pytle P is on KyOS on the Ky Store and GeoStore. It’s available in Cloud Phones we’ll talk about. Basically all these different platforms that are targeting folks in emerging markets. yeah, over the years I’ve built a few more apps and I’ve really been like leveraging this experience from building, scaling and monetizing apps on this type of hardware and for this user demographic into what’s now my current role, which is developer relations as you mentioned for Cloud MoSA.

where I basically get to do the same. I get to help other developers build and grow their experiences to millions of folks around the world who might be using the internet for the very first time.

Maxi Ferreira (04:05) Very interesting. you for sharing that. right now you work, like you said, helping developers build applications for these lower end devices. And I understand there is sort of like a spectrum of different devices from very basic ones to all the way to like an iPhone or a modern Android phone. Can you share more about what that spectrum looks like?

and where in that spectrum does Cloud Phone and the apps that you help developers create fit.

Tom Barrasso (04:35) Yeah, talking roughly around 200 million feature phones are sold worldwide every year, nearly 3 million in the United States alone, which is surprising to many folks. Now, the spectrum basically starts with Cloud Phone at the very bottom. So you have the most affordable device category, which sells the majority of the devices. The cheapest Cloud Phone today is about $12 US, which is why this device category is so popular.

Maxi Ferreira (04:56) Mm-hmm.

Tom Barrasso (04:59) millions of people around the world cannot afford something more expensive, let alone whatever the iPhone 16 Pro Ultra with 10 cameras is.

for, and to put that into perspective, there’s still 2.6 billion people who are unconnected in the world. They can’t even afford one of these $12 phones, or they haven’t been able to invest enough of their savings into that. So on the very low end, you have cloud phone.

These devices have like 16 to 64 megabytes of RAM. They run a real-time operating system. They’re very cheap, again, 12 on the low end, maybe 20 something on the high end. Some have camera, actually most have cameras, some have two cameras. And then a step above that is smart feature phones. These are usually running an operating system called KaiOS. It’s the successor of FirefoxOS. So it’s a platform for basic keypad devices, but it runs web apps locally.

so you can install apps onto your device through the Kai store or the Geo store. It’s very popular in India on the Reliance Geophone. A step above that would be Android Go. So Android Go is basically Google’s stripped down version of Android with lower hardware requirement specifications. So these devices have about two gigabytes of RAM, I believe is what the minimum is now for Android Go. And there’s a few restrictions that they place on things like background services and stuff.

But otherwise, it’s basically Android. So you get to run Android apps. You just have to pay a lot more attention to optimization, because you’re going to run into ANRs or Android not responding errors much more often. So you need to be conscious about memory and CPU. And then, of course, you have Android and iOS, the regular versions of them on the very upper end of the market, which you have everything from phones, tablets, even small laptops that run Android now.

Maxi Ferreira (06:17) Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Tom Barrasso (06:40) Yeah, it’s quite a range, anywhere from like $12 on one of these basic keypad phones to, I couldn’t tell you what the most expensive smartphone is, but it’s probably thousands.

Maxi Ferreira (06:50) Right, yes, yes. You mentioned Cloud Phone at the other end of the spectrum. And can you describe what Cloud Phone is? Because it sounds like it’s a phone, but it’s also like an OS or an app. How do you describe it?

Tom Barrasso (07:05) Yeah, so Cloud Phone actually isn’t an operating system. It’s basically just an app that itself serves as an app store for 4G feature phones. So if you’re a user, the way that it’s going to look today is you’ll buy a phone from Nokia, from Ittel, from any of the various manufacturers who make these phones. And I have an ever-growing number of these things here. So you’ll open the phone. You’ll go to the home screen. And you’ll see an app, a little blue icon that says Cloud Phone. And you’ll click it.

and it will take you into basically another folder where you see a bunch more apps. Now the difference is the apps that are on your home screen within your operating system live within the firmware of the OS. Things like the calculator, the settings, the camera. And then you go to Cloud Phone and this is all based on web technology rendered in a server. So it’s basically an app store for 4G feature phones that overcomes the limitations of the hardware of these devices by offloading all the computation to servers.

And by doing this, you’re able to listen to podcasts and Pod LP. You can watch YouTube or TikTok videos. And you can even talk to ChatGPT or Gemini, ask you questions, and get responses back. So really, basically, any web app that will work in Chrome today, if it will scale down to fit these small screens, could quite easily work on Cloud Phone.

Maxi Ferreira (08:16) Right, I’m very, very impressive. And the way that it works is that it’s not running any of those apps or the code for those apps is not running in the phone itself, right? The phone is essentially a thin client and the rendering happens somewhere else. Is that right?

Tom Barrasso (08:30) Exactly. So yeah, you have two components to Cloud Phone. The Cloud Phone client, which is, as you said, a thin client. You can think of it kind of like Opera Mini or VNC, something that basically is rendering a view, like a window, rendering an image or a vector representation of what you’re looking at. And of course, it’s streaming the audio and video too. So you have the thin client that runs on the phone, and then you have a server that’s doing all the processing. That’s taking the HTML, the CSS, the JavaScript. It’s running all the fetch and XHR commands and web sockets.

Maxi Ferreira (08:42) Mm-hmm.

Tom Barrasso (08:57) It’s doing all the execution, rendering a DOM, and then it’s basically taking all that, outputting it to a canvas the size of the screen like QVGA or QQVGA, and sending it down to the client. So all the heavy lifting is done by the Cloud Phone servers. You don’t need to worry about refactoring, optimization, scaling down your assets. All of that, you don’t need to worry about memory management. All of that will be handled for you by Cloud Phone. The system will make sure that the device runs smoothly because it will make sure everything fits within the confines of

the memory limitations, the available hardware, and you’ll just get a familiar set of web APIs.

Maxi Ferreira (09:30) Right. Right. That’s amazing. So for someone who can perhaps only afford one of these very, very inexpensive, very low end devices, it’s like opening a new world of apps that wouldn’t otherwise be available to them. Right. I imagine it’s similar in a way that the way that I think about it, similar to how you can, for example, I use my PS5 to play games and I can continue playing via remote play on my

very old tablet or an iPad that I have, right? And that’s streaming technology, even though the iPad is definitely not powerful enough to run those PS5 games, it allows me to play that in real time. Is that essentially how it works in a way?

Tom Barrasso (10:10) Yeah,

I think if you’re a dev, that’s exactly the way to think about it. You don’t need to worry about it, but it’s almost like you have a small window that you’re rendering to the screen and all the code that’s being executed. Like if you write your JavaScript, if you’re pulling in React, if you’re building this SPA, it’s all running on the servers and not on the clients. And there’s a myriad of reasons why, but yeah, basically it’s to overcome the limitations of the hardware, like you said, like an old iPad, but to still be able to emulate having a full experience.

Maxi Ferreira (10:13) Mm-hmm.

Okay. That makes sense. So you mentioned I can run, I can run a React application there. and I’m guessing it will be much more performant thanks to cloud phone because it’s rendering on the server and it’s just streaming the, the, the data or the visual representation back to the phones. What are the, where are the sort of the, the things that you keep in mind as a developer, you mentioned the screen size, one of them, you have to develop an app that is

compatible with these very small screens. But what else do developers have to keep in mind when building for targeting one of these feature phones?

Tom Barrasso (11:13) Yeah, so for Cloud Phones specifically, it’s really like any remote browser, which I guess we don’t really think about anymore because there aren’t too many of them around. As computers got more more capable and hardware got more powerful, we just didn’t need this technology. I don’t even know how many, we have six gigs of RAM now on the lowest end iPhone. So at some point it just didn’t matter. But if you had, like I was talking about when I first developed for the old Motorola Droid, the OG Droid,

Maxi Ferreira (11:27) Mm-hmm.

Tom Barrasso (11:39) You could not load a website on that thing without it either crashing and running out of memory, or it had to just be almost like a static page. But yeah, if you’re a developer looking today to a platform like CloudFone that uses a remote browsing technology, the things you’re going to worry about are there’s no access offline. So your app can’t work offline. So you don’t need to worry about handling that. It will only work when the user has an active connection to either 4G or Wi-Fi. And some of these devices do actually have Wi-Fi.

Maxi Ferreira (11:56) Mm-hmm.

Tom Barrasso (12:05) The second is because it’s remote, there’s a rendering limitation. So we don’t put a cap on this, but because of like round trip times for the different networking requests that have to go to get each frame, you basically cap out at around 20 frames per second. So for most apps, that doesn’t matter. It’s totally fine if you’re building a basic app or you’re like scrolling through a grid using the arrow keys, that works fine. But if you’re building like a real time game, a first person shooter, it’s not gonna work well just because

Maxi Ferreira (12:18) Mm-hmm.

Tom Barrasso (12:31) As soon as the network starts to lag, the frames that are being sent over are not going to be smooth. so that experience, it’s not going to work well. Screen size, we mentioned, QVGA and QQVGA. QQVGA is 128 by 160. That’s like a quarter of the size of an Apple watch. So it’s really hard to build for the… It’s both really hard and really easy. Basically strip everything out that isn’t essential, get rid of all your pop-ups, all your alerts, all the modals.

get rid sticky nav, and really just focus in on the core elements that need to be on the screen. So scale down, and then keyboard navigation, as I mentioned. These devices don’t have touch screens today, and so you’re going to be handling arrow keys, which if you’re already used to accessible navigation, it’s pretty much the same, right? If you’re handling tabs and you know how to tab through a grid, you can do the same using arrow up, down, left, right.

Maxi Ferreira (13:17) Right, right, makes sense. And do you see that, so for the screen sizes particularly, do you see developers building like a dedicated version, like a mobile version of their apps? Do you see these being achieved with media queries and that kind of thing? Or how do you developers typically approach that?

Tom Barrasso (13:38) Yeah, I think it depends on the developer. The short answer is we have both. If you’re building a brand new app and you just want it to run on Cloud Phone or Kiowa, it’s pretty easy to just start with QVGA and go from there. If you have an existing web app, yeah, typically what you’ll do is first off, the thing you need to realize is that assuming you’re using a library or a framework, I can almost guarantee you that they won’t support these devices. what I mean by support is they’re not going to have

for instance, CSS breakpoints and media queries that go this far down. Bootstrap, Tailwind, they all start at like 500 to 600 pixels. So you’re not going to have the level of nuance that you need, but you can shim the configs to add extra device targets. So you could add an extra small or an extra extra small for these different screen sizes and then use media queries to say like, if screen is x small then.

Maxi Ferreira (14:07) Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

Tom Barrasso (14:29) hot, make nav relative instead of sticky, and hide this component that isn’t relevant. So yeah, it really depends. You can do both. Both are totally viable. I guess it just depends on how complex your app is and whether or not it would be easier to scale down the interface you currently have, or if it would just be easier to build a new interface today.

Maxi Ferreira (14:32) Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Right, right. Makes sense. Makes sense. can you tell me more about the, what the market looks like for the, for these feature phones? You mentioned some 200 million devices sold every year and a few of them, a few million of them in the U S what does the sort of the demographic look like for people using these phones and where are the, what do you think are like the, the opportunities for the different types of apps that could be successful in this market?

Tom Barrasso (15:15) Yeah, so if you’re trying to break down the user personas, would say probably the biggest category by far is first time internet users in emerging markets. So India is by far the number one consumer of what they call keypad mobiles or basically feature phones. I don’t know the exact numbers, but honestly, it’s probably at least half of all shipments are going to India. And then India’s neighbors are also not far behind Pakistan and Bangladesh, Vietnam. They’re all major.

Maxi Ferreira (15:25) Mm-hmm.

Tom Barrasso (15:42) consumers of feature phones. Africa as a continent, many countries across Africa have frequent feature phone users. And there’s a variety of reasons that people will gravitate towards them. In emerging markets, it’s predominantly older folks, low-income folks, people who simply can’t afford a smartphone, or people who just don’t think they need a smartphone. They just need the basic functionality of a feature phone and maybe a few other things.

And then in other markets, they’re actually quite popular because they’re sort of an anti-theft device. So a lot of people will carry them as a backup phone for two reasons. One is when power goes out and the second is if their smartphone gets stolen. Kind of a wild use case, but yeah, there’s places in the world where crime is high enough that it actually makes sense to keep two of them so that you can still call and text your friends. And then in the Western world, like I said, almost 3 million units are sold in the US alone.

It’s mostly digital detoxers. So you have folks who want to get away from smartphones, completely different demographic, right? Many of these folks can afford to buy these devices and are doing it just because they want that experience, that reduced experience. Senior citizens again are quite common. And then people giving them to kids.

Maxi Ferreira (16:41) Hmm.

Tom Barrasso (16:42) A lot of parents are giving them to kids to limit the types of things that they can access and limit them not like in a parental control sense where like they have a smartphone but you monitor their use but instead just say here’s a flip phone there’s only so much you can do with it right so we trust that this limited experience is enough for you to keep in touch with the people that you need to but not so much that you spend hours a day playing Candy Crush or you know whatever it is kids are getting into on phones these days.

Maxi Ferreira (17:05) Right. Yeah, I can definitely see myself giving one of these phones to my kids once they go older, especially as start to, as their friends start to have phones and you don’t want them exposed to all the things at once. It seems like a good starting point for them. And what types of apps do you see being successful in this market? I imagine games would be popular. Do people use this for like

for work, you see any like, or productivity apps, that kind of thing that are popular maybe in, like at the app store?

Tom Barrasso (17:39) Yeah, so guess the short answer is you’d be surprised that people who, just because you have a device that itself has limited hardware capabilities doesn’t mean that you don’t want the same things that others have on smartphones. Of course, in the digital detoxer case, it’s sort of a conscious decision to get one of these devices for this reason. for the millions who simply can’t afford an Android Go phone or an iPhone,

They’re looking for many of the same things that you would expect on a smartphone. So they want access to news and information, sports scores. You know, we have a lot of cricket apps that are quite popular to keep up with games. You’ve got a lot of education and entertainment apps like with PodLP. People who stream everything from like devotional religious content to entrepreneurship and inspiration.

you know, like news, people who maybe are familiar with like FM radio. The easiest thing for them to think about is like, what are the radio shows that I know that are also available as a podcast? Because they might not know what a podcast is, but when they’ve played it for the first time, they’re like, oh, I know the BBC. So the BBC podcast is the radio, but on this phone. And utilities, you people need all the same things, access to, you know, time conversion, unit conversion, maps, location, helpful apps for arithmetic.

Maxi Ferreira (18:23) Mm-hmm.

Tom Barrasso (18:49) So again, if you’re thinking about the user personas, they’re going to want many of the same things, like mobile payments and to some extent games. Again, the Cloud Phone isn’t a suitable platform for real-time games, but puzzle games, educational games. yeah, it’s wide open. I think you’d be surprised what people would gravitate towards.

Maxi Ferreira (18:57) Mm-hmm.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. That’s fascinating. So you mentioned, okay, games like real time games, that requires requires high FPS or something like that. Probably it’s not a good fit. What are some of the other, what would you say are the limitations or the drawbacks if there are any of CloudFone versus the alternatives and what would those alternatives be?

Tom Barrasso (19:31) Yeah, so if you’re building apps for feature phones and they’re going to be web apps, I guess there’s really three other places, or three places you can go to. Cloud Phone, which is probably the most full feature because it runs in running very recent versions of Chromium and it runs in powerful servers. Next you have KaiOS, which I mentioned, so you can build a web app that will run locally. So if you’re doing KaiOS, you get access to a lot more hardware APIs because it runs on the device. Your apps can run offline so that you can have them do things like download content

And then the user can cache using a service worker. And you can access the app offline. And then you have Opera Mini, which is probably the lowest out of all of them. Opera Mini is running, I think it’s over a decade old now, the Presto engine, which is not even in use anymore for Opera from like 2015. It has execution limits of, think, 2.5 seconds for asynchronous tasks. So if you’re going to run an XHR command, it has to finish fetching the resource in that time. Timeouts are limited to that.

It’s not even running a full ES5. So it’s really good for basic sites, like if you’re going to build a server-side rendering representation of your website that basically just has a small formatted list with a little bit of CSS that just helps you navigate a news article. But it doesn’t do multimedia, so no audio video. It doesn’t do any of the modern APIs, no real time.

So there’s quite a spectrum here in terms of like the capabilities of the different platforms. And it really just depends on what you’re serving, right? If you’re doing multimedia, like if you’re TikTok, you can’t be on Opera Mini because it doesn’t do video or audio. So that’s just out off of that. Versus if you’re in Cloud Phone, we have full support for that natively, including HLS for live streaming. So you can just throw in a playlist file like an M3U8 and have it stream the linear content for various OTT apps.

Yeah, just evaluate what are the key features of your app that you want to offer to this demographic and see which platform it fits on. Get access to one of these devices because they’re so cheap, especially if you’re in the West. Buying one of these phones is not a huge expense to test it out and just get your feet wet into the world of flip phones.

Maxi Ferreira (21:24) Hehehe.

Right,

right, right. So CloudFone serves as an app store, as a way, like an app store for these CloudFone apps. How do you get CloudFone? Like how do you get it installed if you get one of these devices? Do you also like install it first?

Tom Barrasso (21:42) Yeah, so Cloud Phone, it’s sort of the same as Opera Mini. The two of them will come pre-installed on your phone. If they don’t come pre-installed, you can’t add it. There’s no concept of apps or installations or separate installable packages for these devices because they’re running a real-time operating system where all the apps need to be packaged into the firmware at the time that the device ships or in an OTA update that’s sent over the wire. So yeah, there’s no ability to write a native app and then have it installable after the fact.

Maxi Ferreira (21:48) they can’t install, okay.

Mm-hmm.

Tom Barrasso (22:09) So yeah, if the device has Cloud Phone, that’s all you need to access it. Exactly.

Maxi Ferreira (22:12) You can start using it. And how do you,

as a developer, how do you get your app published in CloudFone?

Tom Barrasso (22:19) Yeah,

so if you’ve got a PWA today, if you’ve got some sort of web app that’s hosted somewhere, it could be hosted anywhere from GitHub, Pages, Codflare, your own self-hosting, it doesn’t matter where it is. As long as it’s publicly available, you can go to cloudphone.com, that’s F-O-N-E, and then there’s a dev console link. You type in your email, it’ll send you a magic link that you can click to open the console. You can then add an app, you put in the URL, and you can test it either in the online simulator.

which runs in Google Chrome and gives you a representation of Cloud Phone directly in your desktop. So that’s an easy way to get started today. We give out free developer phones if you want to test it on a physical device. You just put in your IEMI number in on the console, and then you can have your app show up on your phone. And then when you’re ready to publish it, you click Publish, and it goes through a QA process where it’ll get evaluated. And there’s a bunch of things that need to be taken into consideration. Obviously, there’s some legal stuff like

TikTok is available in some countries, but it’s banned in others. And so there’s restrictions by manufacturer, by geography. But yeah, the process is pretty straightforward. You don’t pay, you never have to pay to become a developer. There’s no subscription fees. There’s no fees for running or testing your apps or anything like that or QAing. So yeah, the process should be relatively straightforward, but I think there are so few web app stores that we’ve just sort of forgotten how that world works today. We’re so used to like…

shipping an APK or an IPA file on one of the various platforms. But yeah.

think I would just want to impress, yeah, impress the audience that this is a valuable demographic that I think often goes underserved because it’s not a market that you can easily monetize, right? You can’t convert these users into paying users. They’re not gonna pay $5 a month for a subscription to your app.

But on the other hand, it’s such a huge audience that there’s so little competition in the space. When I launched PodLP, I got a quarter of a million installs on my very first day in India. All organic. I didn’t pay for one of them. That’s not something you’re going to get if you’re publishing in Android or iOS app. There’s just so little competition in the space, and there’s so much organic interest in new content, in new ideas, that people are willing to try it out. And it’s a really low stakes way to test out an idea.

Maxi Ferreira (24:06) Wah.

Mm-hmm.

Tom Barrasso (24:23) But you just need to think about this user and think about the device that you’re on. You know, I gave some UX advice to developer recently who was building a file sharing app and originally it was alphanumeric and I thought, alphanumeric codes aren’t really great because one, not everyone knows the Roman character set so they’re not going to know A through Z. Also, it’s kind of hard to do that with T9. I was like, why don’t you just make it numeric? Almost every language uses the same numbers so you don’t need to worry about zero through nine. That’s universal.

And it’s much easier to type in an eight digit number than it is to type in a four digit letter sequence on these devices. yeah, it’ll take a second to wrap your brain around. But once you do, you get a hold of some of the concepts. you see it’s actually, in many ways, easier than building smartphone apps today.

Maxi Ferreira (25:06) Right, yeah, it seems like a great exercise in like simplicity and going back to the fundamentals, just like building a mobile apps for like an iPhone was in the beginning back when the screens also were a lot smaller, but people were trying to minimize their web, their full blown websites and web apps into a smartphone screen. This seems like a…

an extreme version of that. Like just go back to what are the few things that are fundamental here and how do you think about the user experience from a completely different standpoint. looks like a fantastic exercise, I guess.

Tom Barrasso (25:44) Yeah, and I hope that over time we actually sort of, as more developers exercise this muscle, we start to add that back into the common repertoire. I think it’s sad that we don’t have breakpoints that go smaller than this for various platforms, like Bootstrap, because if you think about the difference between QVGA and VGA, it’s a factor of almost four. That same differential is the same difference between an Apple smartwatch and an iPhone SE.

Maxi Ferreira (25:53) Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Tom Barrasso (26:10) the factor of about four. And so those are completely different devices. You would never want to build the same type of interface. You would never assume the same interaction patterns. And yet most platforms, if they even care at all about screens this small, will traditionally just say, OK, under 500, you get the same thing. It must just work, right? And they don’t think about shrinking the typography, doing marquee animations to scroll large titles, the types of smaller interactions that are necessary, or even stripping back.

You don’t need fancy page animations or transitions or things like that on this platform. It’s cool if you want to, but users aren’t expecting it. again, with this type of resolution, you don’t need those fancy page turners like you used to have on the old Android days that were just fun to show off. You can really just focus on the basics. What’s the service that you’re offering? Is it valuable to users? Do they understand how to navigate the information hierarchy?

Maxi Ferreira (27:00) Exactly.

Yeah, exactly. It makes sense. Do you see as someone who has, sort of, you been working on this space for a long time, do you see this space, have you seen this space growing? developers looking to enter this new market, how do you feel about the future?

Tom Barrasso (27:20) Yeah, so the most tactical thing I’ll say is it’s going to be a growing market because various operators around the world are trying to get rid of their 2G and 3G services, either because of regulatory reasons telling them to shut down or because they want to free up spectrum to allow that bandwidth to be reallocated to other services like 4G and 5G. So telcos around the world are pushing this agenda, but they’re afraid of losing millions of subscribers who currently only have access on 2G devices.

So in places like Vietnam, the major telcos are actually giving away cloud phones for free to people because they want them to be able to upgrade their networks. And they’ve made an economic decision that it’s cheaper to give away a million cloud phones at the cost of however many millions that is for the units than it is to keep running this 2G infrastructure and serving this demographic on their old devices.

the market space for 4G is growing and that means that the things that they can consume, they can stream podcasts, they can stream TikTok, all this stuff, all this content that previously wasn’t possible because of network limitations is now totally viable. So I expect in the next couple of years, it’s going to grow considerably as more and more of these devices move to 4G. And then I think there’s going to be a growth in sort of like dumb smartphones. I definitely think we’re going to see a cloud phone touch device that will

or many devices that will look a lot closer like you would expect an Android device to work, it’ll make bringing web apps over even easier because then you can say, if it works on Android and Chrome, it will work here automatically. All the interaction patterns, you know, the larger screen. So it’ll be familiar to users but still have the same affordability characteristics of a basic feature phone because it will share the same types of hardware, the same networking, the same system on a chip. So I think if we can do that,

I think hundreds of millions of people will be able to connect for the first time using a device that looks a lot like a smartphone, uses the magic of this remote browser server-side rendering to bring really complex web experiences through a touch interface, but at a price that is 1 fifth, 1 sixth, the cheapest Android Go phones are going for today. So if we can keep that $10 to $20 US dollar price target.

and enhance the capabilities of these devices, it’s a no-brainer for millions around the world for the first device that they’ll ever connect to the internet with.

Maxi Ferreira (29:35) Yeah, absolutely. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, that’s fascinating. As I mentioned in the beginning, this is a completely new world for me. So thank you. Thank you so much for teaching me and sharing all this knowledge with us. Before I let you go, Tom, I’d like to do picks with the audience. This could be anything from books to TV shows to software that you’re using. Do you have any picks to share?

Tom Barrasso (30:01) Yeah, so I’ve been doing a lot of traveling and lot of backpacking. So I sort of go back and forth. Like I’ll do a bunch of time in front of a screen. I’ll record a podcast. I’ll write an article. I’ll write some software. And then I’ll just be off the grid for little while. So I keep going back and forth on these things. the software space, I started experimenting with Rust as a WASM target. And that was just fascinating. The learning curve, I still don’t quite get many of the concepts. But.

Yeah, I really got this impression that when I actually got it to compile, it worked exactly like I wanted. There were no errors. that was just a new coming from JavaScript. It’s part of the reason that I would use TypeScript, too. It’s like not dealing with type errors and typecasting issues and not having issues that could have been checked at compile time. So that was fascinating. But I do a lot of reading, too. I finished a couple books, Slow Productivity of Boys and Men, Let the Great World Spin.

Maxi Ferreira (30:28) Hmm.

Tom Barrasso (30:52) I guess for anyone interested, would say slow productivity is a good quick read to just give you this, you know, I really, because I work with a lot of folks that are in digital detoxers and I’ve explored that world myself, like really figuring out how to reconnect your and tap into your focus so that you’re not sucked into the world of smartphones and push notifications and gamification in the attention economy. So yeah, how can we still be productive without finding our, you know.

Maxi Ferreira (31:13) Mm-hmm.

Tom Barrasso (31:17) We’ve all been there. You look back up from your screen and hours have passed and you’re like, man, what have I done? So yeah, trying to overcome that and be more present.

Maxi Ferreira (31:25) That is by Cal Newport, right? The same author as Deep Work book. Is that? Perfect.

Tom Barrasso (31:30) Yep, yeah, exactly, calendar report. So

pretty accessible author. He writes pretty plainly, so it’s very, very easy read.

Maxi Ferreira (31:38) Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, thank you for sharing that. My pick today, so similarly, I’ve been playing with a new technology myself, but it’s Laravel. I just really enjoy it. yeah, everything seems familiar and…

Everything like the API design of Laravel is something that I really enjoy. Things seem easy. Like there are ton of less decisions that you have to make. And so far I haven’t encountered anything. haven’t shipped anything to production yet. I will say that I’m still, everything is working locally in my computer. So I haven’t faced any of the real world challenges, but I’ve been really enjoying the experience of using Laravel to build up. So I will.

Tom Barrasso (32:18) And that’s a

PHP framework.

Maxi Ferreira (32:21) Yes, I forgot to mention that, but yes, Laravel is a PHP framework. It’s a backend framework, but they recently, well, they have this for a while, but they made it even easier to get started with like a React front end. So they have a starter kit that just works out of the box with all the modern React ecosystem, like ShotCN and all of that. So I’ve been playing with that using React on the front end and Laravel in the backend.

Yeah, I just really enjoyed it. So highly, highly recommend it.

Tom Barrasso (32:50) Yeah, that’s awesome. I use Hugo as a static site and I do a lot of vanilla JS because I feel like one of the questions I get most often is, what framework do I need for Cloud Phone? In short, none. You don’t need any. You can build with whatever you want. You could use any of them. You could use Vue, React, we have starter kits for all of them.

Maxi Ferreira (33:00) Hehehehe

Tom Barrasso (33:05) You don’t need them. And it’s actually kind of fun because when you do get to work in Cloud Phone, because it’s the latest Chrome, you’re not dealing with backwards compatibility, because all the server fleet runs the same version, you don’t have to worry about a browser from six years ago. So you can use web components natively. You can just write your web components. You can use any of the APIs that are available and not have to worry about transpiling and all that, the fun world of web. If you’ve been to web long enough,

Maxi Ferreira (33:06) Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Tom Barrasso (33:29) It’s gotten better, but yeah compatibility is still always you’re still always thinking about like pulling in core.js and poly filling and shimming and Transpiling and you get to just ignore all of that and just write it in the latest You know ECMAScript version and get all the all the latest and greatest features

Maxi Ferreira (33:39) Right.

Yeah, no,

is a big selling point because yes, that’s someone who, like you said, has been around and working with the web and the front end for long time. You know how painful it is to have to target all these different devices and the differences. having something that just eliminates a problem, you only target Chrome, just makes our lives much easier.

Tom Barrasso (33:55) You

Yeah, exactly.

Maxi Ferreira (34:09) All right, Tom, thank you so much for joining me today. We’ll leave links to all of the places, but are you hanging out anywhere online? Where can people learn more about you and CloudFone?

Tom Barrasso (34:20) Yeah, so again, Cloud Phone, can find it at F-O-N-E. And then there you’ll find all of our links. We’ve got a developer portal. We’ve got a subreddit, a Discord server. So you can reach out on any of those. There’s emails. Send us anywhere that’s convenient to you. You can send in a request for a developer device if you want to get started, and we’ll happily ship one over.

And otherwise, yeah, podlp.com for my app. you have a podcast, can see a preview page there. If you have one of these phones, you can listen to podcasts on them. yeah, otherwise, just connect from any of the various hyperlinks there that we’ll have in the show notes.

Go ahead and get started. And again, feel free to reach out. The thing about being a small company is that we actually can respond to people. if you’ve got questions, if you need to know about if a certain API is supported, if you get started and you run into an issue, yeah, we’re just a message away to help you move forward.

Maxi Ferreira (35:20) That’s very cool. It’s very cool. Thank you. All right. Well, thank you for joining me again, Tom.

Tom Barrasso (35:25) Yeah, thank you again Maxi.