Reply to post: Where's the room for another competitor?

Where's the room for another competitor?

You need apps, which pretty much means you need Android compatibility. It has to be better than Android in some significant way for OEMs to want to use it instead of Android. Android is already free, so you can't compete on price. Android runs well enough on bottom end phones now there's no room there. You could totally redo the UI, but is that enough to get consumers to choose it? And if they do, what protection do you have against Samsung or Google copying its essence and taking away your advantage?

The only way you can compete against Android is to monetize it like Google does. That means you need to be the one getting the revenue from the data collection machine, rather than Google, and sharing it with OEMs to incent them to make phones using your OS. You need to already be collecting a ton of data on people to make this viable at scale, which leaves the usual suspects who already got burned in mobile and gave up: Microsoft and Amazon.