Baidu Yi

~ the goodbye ~

On 2 September 2011 Baidu stood up at its own technology conference in Beijing and announced an operating system. It was called Baidu Yi, and underneath it was Android. Every handset maker in China was already shipping Android with a skin over the top of it. Baidu went a layer deeper and took Google's services out of the sockets, then put its own in. Search was Baidu search. Maps were Baidu maps.

The pitch was cloud storage you did not have to think about, 180 GB of it to start, upgradeable past the point where the number meant anything. There was a voice-driven search box called SmartBox, and Baidu's own music and reader apps sitting where Google's would have been. Android apps still ran, because underneath the substitutions it was still Android and breaking that would have defeated the purpose.

In 2011 the Android you could buy in Ankara came with Google's services on it, because that was the only kind of Android sold here. Baidu Yi was designed for a market where Google had already walked out of the country the year before and the slots where its services used to sit were commercially available. The ground under the product was simply different from the ground under mine, which is why this one gets written from the outside.

Dell built the first phone for it and shipped it in December 2011. Then the operating system changed its name twice, quietly, the way products do when the original branding has stopped earning its keep. On 11 March 2015 Baidu announced that updates were suspended, gave internal business restructuring as the reason, and closed the official forums.

~ the chronicle ~

~ three names, one product ~

Anyone looking for Baidu Yi in 2014 would not have found it, because by then it was called something else. The platform launched in September 2011 as 百度·易, Baidu Yi. In June 2012 it was rebuilt on Android 4.0 and renamed 百度云ROM, Baidu Cloud ROM, which repositioned it from an operating system you bought on a phone to a ROM you flashed onto a phone you already owned. In September 2014 it was renamed once more to 百度云OS, Baidu Cloud OS.

The renames are the reason the product is hard to find and easy to undercount. Three names across three and a half years, one continuous codebase, and the numbers that get quoted at the end belong to the last name rather than the first. Six official releases and sixty-seven public beta builds, running on more than a hundred and fifty handset models by the time it stopped.

~ the dell phone ~

Dell announced the Streak Pro D43 on 20 December 2011, the first phone built around Baidu Yi, sold through China Unicom and never sold anywhere else. A 1.5 GHz dual-core behind a 4.3-inch screen, running an operating system whose entire proposition was that it talked to Baidu's servers instead of Google's. Dell was already most of the way out of the phone business by then and the Streak line did not survive much longer.

~ the last build ~

The announcement on 11 March 2015 did not use the word closed. It said updates were suspended because of an adjustment to the company's internal business, which is the kind of phrasing that leaves a door open without promising to walk back through it. Nobody walked back through it. The forums went dark, the release cadence that had produced sixty-seven betas in under three years stopped dead, and ten million handsets kept running the last build until their owners replaced them.

Baidu did not leave mobile. It went back to shipping individual apps onto other people's Android and onto iOS, which is what it had been good at before it decided it wanted the layer underneath. The operating system ambition came back years later wearing a different face entirely, as a voice assistant rather than a phone platform.

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