There is a new Swiss startup out there, and it’s looking to compete with Google and Apple with its privacy-focused OS. The company’s name is Apostrophy, and it wants to charge you a subscription fee.
This Swiss company will launch a privacy-focused OS to compete with Google & Apple
Yes, you read it right, this company wants to charge a subscription fee for its combo of software and services. The company has been founded by “mobile industry veterans”, says Bloomberg. It will announce its OS this week, actually.
The company was founded by Petter Neby, who has experience selling “high-design, low-tech mobile phones”. He’s going to go to the World Economic Forum to promote Apostrophy, and try to get investors’ trust.
The thing is, breaking the Google and Apple duopoly won’t be easy. Apostrophy may be counting on regulators as well, as both Google and Apple have been under increasing pressure for the duopoly situation.
A ton of well-known companies have tried to break that bubble in the past, and have been unsuccessful. Companies like Samsung, Microsoft, Mozilla, BlackBerry, and so on.
It employs some software engineers who worked on KaiOS
Apostrophy actually has some software engineers who worked on KaiOS, in case you were wondering what’s the situation on that front. Apostrophy actually has over 50 employees globally at this point. It is trying to raise €10 million ($11 million) this year to get things going.
Now, as mentioned earlier, the company’s OS will become official at some point this week. It’ll be called ‘AphyOS’, and it’s built on top of an open-source version of Android called ‘GrapheneOS’.
AphyOS will segregate apps in order to prevent tracking of user behavior. You will be able to run Android apps on this OS, but Google services won’t be included.
As mentioned earlier, we’ve seen a ton of attempts to compete with Google and Apple in the past, and none of them were successful. It’ll be interesting to see what will Apostrophy end up offering, of course.