If Google takes the foot off the pedal on mobile, it will leave a gap in the smartphone market wide enough to drive a truck through.
A group of smart folks who worked on Pixel & Android can take voluntary redundancy together and start a company with the tech and their experience.
What a wonderful world that’d be - to be able to buy SOTA devices made by a company that doesn’t also make tracking software that tracks you all over the Internet, and that doesn’t want to show you ads. A company that just wants to sell you a product that you buy with your money.
This is what anti-monopoly regulation is for - we all just forgot during the recent period of lax enforcement.
A group of smart folks who worked on Pixel & Android can take voluntary redundancy together and start a company with the tech and their experience
How did that work out for Andy Rubin and the Essential Phone?
It takes more than money, experience, and collective brain power to build a modern smartphone of sufficient dependability. Unfortunately, most companies in this space, both new and old, are more likely to shoot themselves in the feet than offer a compelling alternative to the incumbents like Apple and Samsung.
Honestly, it sounds like he really just had poor execution. If the phone I ordered came 6 months late, poor touchscreen, and my email was sold/stolen I'd probably not use that company again.
leave a gap in the smartphone market wide enough to drive a truck through
I think the opportunity is most likely going to be taken Huawei's HarmonyOS than something like Lineage or Librem.
As such we should consider this almost a-kin to a DeepSeek level threat to international security. Google did a lot to secure our phones [0], and we were lucky their economic incentive forced them to be as open as they were.
It's what Carl Pei did with Nothing phone. They do a great job for such a small team. However their company is still losing money with 500mil revenue. It's almost impossible to compete in this market with the big boys.
May be a paid OS with a 10-15$/year subscription to fund the development might work if enough people are interested, but seeking how the mod ecosystem has stagnated I don't see how will this work.
Would love this, in light of recent decision-making at the bigger companies. I refuse to use Google products when it’s at all possible to avoid them, and would prefer to move away from Apple (for similar but different reasons).
That said, it’s hard to imagine anyone in the current tech ecosystem (where everything is either ARR-driven, or “free”) building an OS that isn’t bloated with tracking and spyware.
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Why this is exciting:
If Google takes the foot off the pedal on mobile, it will leave a gap in the smartphone market wide enough to drive a truck through.
A group of smart folks who worked on Pixel & Android can take voluntary redundancy together and start a company with the tech and their experience.
What a wonderful world that’d be - to be able to buy SOTA devices made by a company that doesn’t also make tracking software that tracks you all over the Internet, and that doesn’t want to show you ads. A company that just wants to sell you a product that you buy with your money.
This is what anti-monopoly regulation is for - we all just forgot during the recent period of lax enforcement.
How did that work out for Andy Rubin and the Essential Phone?
It takes more than money, experience, and collective brain power to build a modern smartphone of sufficient dependability. Unfortunately, most companies in this space, both new and old, are more likely to shoot themselves in the feet than offer a compelling alternative to the incumbents like Apple and Samsung.
That may be true, but this is frequently how progress is made. Employees from old stagnant megacorp launching something new and better..
Honestly, it sounds like he really just had poor execution. If the phone I ordered came 6 months late, poor touchscreen, and my email was sold/stolen I'd probably not use that company again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_Phone#Issues
I think the opportunity is most likely going to be taken Huawei's HarmonyOS than something like Lineage or Librem.
As such we should consider this almost a-kin to a DeepSeek level threat to international security. Google did a lot to secure our phones [0], and we were lucky their economic incentive forced them to be as open as they were.
[0] https://www.privacyguides.org/en/os/android-overview/#google...
It's what Carl Pei did with Nothing phone. They do a great job for such a small team. However their company is still losing money with 500mil revenue. It's almost impossible to compete in this market with the big boys.
May be a paid OS with a 10-15$/year subscription to fund the development might work if enough people are interested, but seeking how the mod ecosystem has stagnated I don't see how will this work.
As much as I'd like that to happen, it seems to depend on some big "ifs." Fingers crossed, I guess.
Would love this, in light of recent decision-making at the bigger companies. I refuse to use Google products when it’s at all possible to avoid them, and would prefer to move away from Apple (for similar but different reasons).
That said, it’s hard to imagine anyone in the current tech ecosystem (where everything is either ARR-driven, or “free”) building an OS that isn’t bloated with tracking and spyware.