Development and design of Chrome should not and cannot be done by the company that runs the search engine and gets its revenue from ads.
I’d go so far as to argue the exact same for development of: Operating systems, automotive, smartphones, residential fiber…
The ulterior motive is simply never in a user’s best interest when every function ultimately becomes part of the “influence towards the purchase of goods and services” funnel.
While I find your assertion inspiring and very worthy of consideration, I have to wonder what the incentive is to sustain Android development. Apple sells the hardware that goes with its OS(es), so they get the hardware revenue (not to mention the App Store and iCloud subscription revenues). They would have to start charging devices to use their operating system or something, and I have to wonder if that would be possible under open source licenses.
I would love an open, sustained, and even open source, secure operating system for phones that’s the target of app development. I think the Linux stack should should develop an NPR/PBS type ecosystem public funding of development (with maybe the corporate underwriting of those networks being equivalent to contributions from corporate employed developers to the open source code) and I’d love for it to be a real competitor in the smart phone market (knowing the Android stack modifies and sits on top of Linux).
I have to wonder what the incentive is to sustain Android development
Cuts from app purchases and in-app purchases. Of course, developers can implement their own payment gateways and distribute their apps in third party stores, but nobody would do this at risk of being removed from play store.
