Nothing and MrWhoseTheBoss break down the true cost of building a mobile OS from scratch: $40.47M. Planning, AOSP development, testing, and why Android wins.
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Nothing has laid out striking figures that show what it really costs to build a mobile operating system of its own. In a new video created with popular tech YouTuber MrWhoseTheBoss, the team set out to calculate the end-to-end price of developing an OS from scratch — and landed on $40.47 million. That surpasses the budget they previously put on producing a flagship smartphone, pegged at $26 million — a contrast that says a lot about where the toughest challenges now lie.
The process starts with a two-month planning phase to define goals, architecture, and design. Six months of platform work follow, as the team develops its own version of Android (AOSP) tailored to specific needs. From there, it’s testing, refinement, and hardware optimization — each stage demanding substantial resources and the efforts of dozens of specialists.
By Nothing’s count, engineering and development alone add up to more than $34 million, while additional costs — licenses, cloud GPUs, testing, and a contingency for the unexpected — push the total beyond $40 million.
That’s why the company opted to build on the Android Open Source Project rather than reinvent the stack. The approach saves time and money while preserving compatibility with Google’s ecosystem. The project’s authors note that creating a full-fledged alternative like HarmonyOS could take four years and require several times more investment. In this context, pragmatism clearly wins out over purism.