Like, why would you make #A11y's OS exclusive?
I could see some non-marketing justifications.
- Fewer devices to test (including a far smaller number of resolutions and processors)
- Fewer versions and flavors of Android to test
- It's currently unoptimized code and only works as advertised on flagships but not lower-spec phones (as flagships generally receive OS updates first)
- The feature is in some form of beta and needs real user data to function properly (but not too much data, which a wide release would unleash)
- A significant number of the APIs necessary for it to work are Q/10-exclusive, and need to be backported to the Google Play Services compatibility library and/or the AndroidX APIs to work on past versions (such as Live Transcribe on Oreo)
Burying the lede because obviously low-level API access (not only to display transcriptions, but the ML pipeline to decode and translate system audio in real-time) is needed to make the feature work at all.