The Technology Behind the $40 Million Price Tag for Building a Personalized Smartphone OS
Nothing reveals what it costs for this process to create later a custom operating system for a smartphone, showing that this amounts to about $40 million.
Development Process and Cycle
According to Nothing, the OS follows the development cycle which is much structured for an AOSP based Android platform. It takes about two months by which the first phase is planning; setting-on what; budget and design. The next six months after that is building the core platform from AOSP.
When finished building the platform, for further course the engineers would take a particular period of three months, adapting the system with individual hardware of devices. Generally, the last stage would need preparing for the release, which involves implementing proprietary applications and the initial software update. Meanwhile, testing and quality control take place all along the procedural development.
Breakdown of the $40 Million App Cost
Thus, the greatest chunk goes to human resources. The lump sum figure of over $34 million goes into salaries assigned to engineers and designers employed to build and polish the operating system.
The rest of the budget is splashed across a number of key areas:
- Cloud GPU enlistment for development and testing.
- Software licenses.
- Buying necessary test equipment.
- A 15% reserve fund for unforeseen expenses.
AOSP is the Chosen Route
Nothing made much-clear evidence of AOSP as a weapon for strategic investment on costs and lapse time development. In fact, creating a completely independent operating system from ground-up would have meant an even bigger undertaking, such as HUAWEI's HarmonyOS. Such a project would probably take four years minimum and far more costly than the $40 million they pay for their AOSP-based system.
