LeWa OS (Chinese: 乐蛙), also known as Music Frogs and жабка, was an operating system for smartphones, based on the Android mobile platform. Developed by Chinese company Lewa Technology, it was mainly intended for low-cost phones under 1000 yuan (around US$126). By the end of April 2013, there were more than 2 million users of the system, and by the end of July 2012, they were among the most popular third-party Android-based ROMs in China, together with

MIUI MIUI (pronunciation: ''Me You I'') is an Android -based mobile operating system developed and maintained by Xiaomi independently of Google exclusively for its smartphones. MIUI includes various features such as theme support. It is the basis f ...

and DianXin OS (also known as Tapas OS). Lewa was also the first aftermarket Android-based firmware in the world to support the dual-SIM standby feature.

History

LeWa's team started developing ROMs for Android devices since August 2009, before the LeWa company was established. Soon after LeWa's technology was established in Shanghai at April 2011, it had received 20 million Reminbi

angel investment An angel investor (also known as a business angel, informal investor, angel funder, private investor, or seed investor) is an individual who provides capital for a business or businesses start-up, usually in exchange for convertible debt or owners ...

from Green Pine Capital Partners (also the Round A investor of fanfou.com, coship and some other companies) by June 2011. The company released the first official release of LeWa OS in October 2011. In June 2012, the first "Open Build" version was released with parts of its source code open-sourced, accompanied by a

toolchain In software, a toolchain is a set of programming tools that is used to perform a complex software development task or to create a software product, which is typically another computer program or a set of related programs. In general, the tools for ...

for developers to build their own versions of the OS. During early July 2012, it received 50 million renminbi (~7/9 million USD) funding from

Tencent Tencent Holdings Ltd. () is a Chinese multinational technology and entertainment conglomerate and holding company headquartered in Shenzhen. It is one of the highest grossing multimedia companies in the world based on revenue. It is also the wo ...

, and LeWa started deeply integrating Tencent's mobile manager into their ROM since a month before that and provided a SDK to block spam messages on the system level. Observers believe this investment is part of Tencent's strategy to enter the ROM-flashing market. By Late July 2012, the company introduced ''M+ Platform'', becoming the first team to develop ROMs optimized for the

MediaTeK MediaTek Inc. () is a Taiwanese fabless semiconductor company that provides chips for wireless communications, high-definition television, handheld mobile devices like smartphones and tablet computers, navigation systems, consumer multimedia ...

platform. The Chinese version of Nokia X had been found to ship with LeWa OS 5 by default in early 2014.

Features

The ROM includes its own

app store An App Store (or app marketplace) is a type of digital distribution platform for computer software called applications, often in a mobile context. Apps provide a specific set of functions which, by definition, do not include the running of the c ...

named "LeWa Market", a power-save mode, adjustable switches in notification bar, and other modifications "optimized and localized" for Chinese users. It releases new version via

over-the-air update Over-the-air programming (OTA programming) refers to various methods of distributing new software, configuration settings, and even updating encryption keys to devices like mobile phones, set-top boxes, electric cars or secure voice communication ...

s every Friday. Unofficial releases are available for certain phones without official support from LeWa. Some believe that it provides a user experience and design that's similar or better than

iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also include ...

and

, and some also praise the ROM for being simple and battery-saving. However, some Chinese commentators believe that it consumes more battery than stock Android.

References

External links

* {{Android Custom Android firmware Proprietary software

History

Features

See also

References

External links