Its really easy to make a custom rom but hard to do serious "real life" stuff; companies don't want to make it easy. To most regular users, if they cant download apps from the google play store, and they can't use venmo\cashapp, then the OS is dead in the water from day 1
When you buy a Windows PC, the first thing a lot of tech people will do is format it and put on a clean install of Windows without all of the OEM crapware, or in these days install Linux if grandma is just using email and Facebook anyway.
If you try to do that on your Android device, your bank app is broken, most importantly not because of anything the alternate OS is doing wrong, which causes the vast majority of people to not want to do it even if it means suffering the OEM crapware, with no way for the alternative OS to fix it. And that in turn allows the OEMs to get away with locked bootloaders etc., because then they're not losing sales to a competitor that lets you remove the crapware when nobody can do it either way.
But I still haven't contacted the support to ask them to verify phones in another way.
We actually saw this play out twice with Microsoft's return to mobile (Windows phone) and web browsers, money is a pretty small part of it.
Trying to get some scale, you're hypothesizing about giving 10 millions to HSBC to make business with your startup, when they're throwing away 500+ millions every year just to cover their money laundering.
https://www.investopedia.com/stock-analysis/2013/investing-n...
And we're discussing doing this for basically every major banks.
I see it akin to the proverbial "not getting out of bed for less than XXXXX". You're getting out of bed every day, for free. But having someone make you do it for a specific reason will be an exponentially harder proposition.
> 1 line in their app
Aren't you asking them to maintain compatibility outside of Play Services and be on available on your platform ? That's a whole project, including their (or their contracting shop's) validating the whole new stack from a security and technical perspective, and a legal and business check on what that actually means to them.
Perhaps we can look at it from a darker perspective: if a random guy came to the bank to ask them support for their parralel phone ecosystem, the bank would at least want to know what they're getting into and what's in it for them. Especially if they're offered 10 millions for allegedly one line of code.
I just made up the figure. Perhaps 10 billion dollars is more enticing. Perhaps you have to purchase the company outright and then dictate they add support. My point is that it's not impossible to get the apps people need to work on an alternate Android OS. It is a matter of funding conpatibility. You can find a niche audience of people to start out with to make a competitive OS for them. And then overtime expand that audience more and more.
>Aren't you asking them to maintain compatibility
Typically the complaints about banks is that they use the Play Integrity library which doesn't trust other operating systems. So the ask is to support the Android API for integrity and to trust the key of the OS provider. This would be done via a new library to make integration easier and more foolproof.
> You can pay app developers to port their apps off of play services, you can pay developers to add support for your attestation keys.
an additional anecdote from my time then: they came to where i was working at the time and proposed funding a windows mobile version of our app (quite a large sum) but our supervisor finally said no, because the upkeep of now 3 apps would be too much for too few customers
you cant just throw money at devs and expect much unless you have the user base (potential market) to back it up
1. It doesn't require an entirely new app. You can ship the same apk on all platforms.
2. Most apps already don't have a hard dependency on play services.
Key clients requesting support for the alternative OS will be a way faster route IMHO. The same way nobody bribed banks to support android, they saw the market share and potential and decided by themselves it was a worth doing. Which is why it came so late.
I understand you're offering a way to get around the chicken and egg problem, I'm saying dealing with the supply part is crazy hard. Somewhat paying users to buy into your ecosystem despite the lack of support could be a better use of money (I'm thinking about Meta subsidizing Occulus until it got some traction, and I assume it's still in the red after so many years)
> the Android API
People loosely explain the lack of technical challenge, but from the institution's POV you're asking them to expand their trust from Google, a US company which will be solely responsible if anything critical happens...to potentially each single phone maker, whoever happens to be selling the device to your clients ?
If Google didn't exist that's what they'd do. But Play Services is a thing. The more I think about the less I see an incentive for any established player to do that move until customers are actively clamoring for it. There's just no upside otherwise.