Yandex.Kit

» see kit.yandex.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

19 February is World Whale Day, and that is the date Yandex chose. The pun is the whole pitch: кит is Russian for whale, kit is English for a complete set of parts, and the logo Art. Lebedev Studio delivered two days later was a whale drawn out of colored arcs that also read as a mobile signal-strength icon. The argument the whole thing rested on was that a Russian company could hand a phone manufacturer a finished Android with none of Google inside it.

Underneath it was Android 4.2.2 with every Google application taken out and a Yandex one put in its place. The maps were Yandex Maps and the browser was Yandex Browser. Google Play was gone and Yandex.Store stood where it had been, carrying over a hundred thousand applications on release day and giving back ten percent of anything you spent if you had bought a Kit phone. Buyers also got fifty extra gigabytes of Yandex.Disk. You could not install any of it yourself. Kit was a preload, sold to manufacturers rather than to people, and Yandex gave it to them free while Google was charging seventy-five cents a handset for its own services.

The parts that were genuinely good were the parts nobody outside Russia would ever notice. The phonebook understood that Шурик and Александр are the same person. It was wired into Yandex.Spravochnik, so an incoming call from a business you had never saved could resolve itself against a directory of three million organizations. The keyboard knew Russian cases, and when you typed a password it showed you the word in both the Cyrillic and the Latin layout at once, which solves a specific daily humiliation that only exists if you switch keyboards forty times a day.

~ the dossier ~

~ where it came from ~

Yandex bought SPB Software in 2011, and from that moment the Russian press ran a rumor every few months that a Yandex phone was coming. What the acquisition actually produced for three years was Yandex.Shell, a launcher you installed on top of somebody else's Android. Kit was the version of that idea where Yandex owned the whole image instead of renting a corner of it.

Shell was redrawn from scratch for Kit. Home screens sat on a three-dimensional carousel with widgets and folders wherever you dropped them. There was no app drawer at all, so every installed application lived out on a home screen the way it does on an iPhone. Voice went through Yandex.SpeechKit, and moving your contacts in from an old handset was a service of its own called Yandex.Pereezd.

~ the phones ~

Four handsets and three tablets, and the list is a snapshot of the Russian mid-market in 2014: Huawei Honor 3 Yandex, Explay Flame, Explay Alto, DEXP Ixion Y5, plus tablets from DEXP and Smarto. The arrangement itself was imported from China, where search companies and hardware makers had already been striking these deals for years.

It was not a total failure at retail. In November 2014 the Smarto tablets running Kit were the best-selling tablets at Media Markt in Russia, and DEXP and Smarto slabs with Kit on them were still on shelves into spring 2015, after the project was already finished internally.

Turkey had a local version of the same bet running at roughly the same time, with Turkcell putting its own name on Android handsets and pushing its own application store onto them. That one did not end any better, and for the same reason: an operator or a portal can get a phone into a box, and then the person holding the box goes looking for the apps their friends have.

~ the actual end ~

Android's share of the Russian market went from eleven percent in 2010 to eighty-six percent by 2014. Kit had been built on the assumption that there was still a window in which Yandex services could be substituted for Google's at the factory, and by the time it shipped the window had closed. Manufacturers were not especially interested and neither were buyers.

In April 2015 the development team posted three words to the project's Facebook page: прощай, Яндекс. Goodbye, Yandex. The project was closed the following month, some of the developers left the company and the rest were moved onto other things. The Russian tech press filed the story under a headline about the whale having drowned.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »