I have no inside knowledge and am just learning about the square handleheld product right now, but if I were to try and build a competitive alternative to iOS / Android for mobile devices this feels like the right way to do it. Bottom up, with a speciality product which has value for business customers. Eventually you grow to a more consumer market slowly without needing to boil the ocean.
My guess is that it’s some fork of Android with a customized OS and mini-AppStore for apps from Block. In order to compete against Google you’d need services and apps everyone wants, which is a hell of a moat. The solution that Chinese companies have for that is their consumers want different apps because western apps don’t work in china. I don’t know how you’d do it in the west. Maybe play off Europeans desire to not be dependent on American tech, maybe support Android / flutter / KMM apps? Maybe new agents will unseat the entire legacy SaaS products will dry up the Google/Apple moat.
We know how much the duopoly in mobile is a fundamental threat to free speech and an open internet. Doing something about it is a lot harder. Big efforts have failed so many times, an incremental strategy might just work.
https://squareup.com/us/en/hardware/handheld
