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?”
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?”