You have fair points and much more experience than I have in this domain.
Yeah, $5 even at a 1M users is probably not that much, having to maintain drivers, and as you mentioned serving updates, that would require a team.
With regards to the Google apps, I think a company would be better off trying to make something of their own, or collaborate with some app makers, at least for difficult stuff like maps, camera, gallery, browser(not sure about the paid codecs)
As for the app store, I know that's a big project, but that would have to be custom and a core product of the company.
Hope you'll eventually find a way to monetize your ROM.
For what it's worth, I indeed thought of a a direction where app store would be the major aspect of it.The idea would be this ROM would be a "safe place". With regards to app store, this would mean:
- with "all you can eat" monthly subscription that gets you all the apps included, so no whaling allowed
- and with severe policing against dark patterns
- including a "panic button" so users can report whether they got addicted to some app.
But when I tried to design that, I very quickly ended up into a rabbit hole of "how to compute which app deserves which share of the revenue". And then, how to define "dark patterns".
And here I am, still haven't actually tried anything.
Yeah, $5 even at a 1M users is probably not that much, having to maintain drivers, and as you mentioned serving updates, that would require a team.
With regards to the Google apps, I think a company would be better off trying to make something of their own, or collaborate with some app makers, at least for difficult stuff like maps, camera, gallery, browser(not sure about the paid codecs)
As for the app store, I know that's a big project, but that would have to be custom and a core product of the company.
Hope you'll eventually find a way to monetize your ROM.