Comment by VorpalWay
12 days ago
Android is open source (decreasingly, but still). A reasonable starting point would be forking it and adding replacements for the proprietary Google Play services, app store etc.
Gobally Android also has a much larger market share than Apple. (Yes the US is the opposite, it is an outlier.)
It can be done, but a few things are needed: money. A lot of money. And competent project managers / architects / visionaries.
The money problem is the sticking point; even if you can find investors, if you don't have guarantees of sales you're boned. Actually, this is the other problem: Android is not profitable per se, you don't get an "android license fee" on your bill if you buy a new phone. It's the tie-in with Google's services (default search engine with ads, app store, etc) that make it work. And even without those, Google is a company that originally made money off of ads on webpages, they could do whatever they want outside of that because their primary source of income was so reliable.