>There are a bunch of Android forks in the wild[1].
That's absolutely correct. And some of those forks are significantly better than the Android OEM offerings by the phone manufacturers.
However, that's orthogonal to GP's point. Only a very small percentage[0] of Android users would even consider flashing custom roms, and even fewer would have the knowledge or confidence to do so.
As such, the impact of custom roms/no chrome is most likely rounding error for Google.
I'd point out that I've used custom roms quite a bit, initially because (as usual) my phone vendor stopped providing updates after a year and after that because custom roms are often better than stock roms.
But I'm not your typical user, as I'm technical and it really pisses me off that vendors use the lack of support to pressure folks to buy new phones.
That's absolutely correct. And some of those forks are significantly better than the Android OEM offerings by the phone manufacturers.
However, that's orthogonal to GP's point. Only a very small percentage[0] of Android users would even consider flashing custom roms, and even fewer would have the knowledge or confidence to do so.
As such, the impact of custom roms/no chrome is most likely rounding error for Google.
I'd point out that I've used custom roms quite a bit, initially because (as usual) my phone vendor stopped providing updates after a year and after that because custom roms are often better than stock roms.
But I'm not your typical user, as I'm technical and it really pisses me off that vendors use the lack of support to pressure folks to buy new phones.
[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19943324/how-many-users-... (an old link, but it's not likely that much has changed to increase the number of folks using custom roms -- quite likely the opposite)