A bid to break up Alphabet Inc.’s Google is one of the options being considered by the Justice Department after a landmark court ruling found that the company monopolized the online search market, according to people with knowledge of the deliberations.
Think less Samsung, and a whole lot more Amazon Fire OS. And if you think Google hasn’t been doing R&D for Android except for “useless” AI and something that could be done a small outside time… I don’t know what to say to you then. I guess modern Bluetooth stacks, newer technology support and functionality, embedded encryption, etc… must be easy? A lot of R&D is done on the not very flashy things as well.
I never meant to claim that Google hasn’t been doing any R&D that wasn’t those non-requested features. I was just stating that, for a company independently maintaining the OS, it would cost substantially less than what Google currently spends, since they would likely cut out more bloat, (and anything that’s Google-integration specific about Android development) and instead leave that to third-party developers, Google or otherwise.
Issue is, cutting bloat takes time and money that a smaller company would more likely view as taking away from new features which isn’t viewed as a good thing. Look at reviews for versions of Android and iOS that were more focused on cutting bloat and improving code vs versions that add to the OS. You’ll notice that focusing on code bloat and trimming gets at best “ho-hum” reviews with people complaining that “we’ve been waiting for a year for nothing” and “what’s the point of updating to this?”