First, Android was never a stand-alone company, it started as a product of Google's.
If all companies went their own way, you wouldn't have Android, you'd have what we had 15 years ago - each company writing its own OS, and no one marketing apps (although some of us wrote apps for our own use - but every time you got a phone with a different system you had to write different apps, you couldn't even port them.)
If "Android" did away with the look, with AI (which it isn't, it's jut a good parser and a decent database lookup on a huge database), you'd still be back to the same thing - every company with its own "AI", so you couldn't have things like Echo or Alexa controlling smart devices, because half of that is "baked into" Android. And if it didn't have Material Design, it would still have
some design - but every manufacturer would have its own - so things that interoperate with parts of the phone having to do with the design would have to be written by each manufacturer - fracturing Android even further.
You're missing something that any competent junior developer would have seen immediately (and I wouldn't call 46 years of experience "junior level"):
When you remove critical parts of a system, the system falls apart completely. It's like Android was a building and all you want to remove are the foundation and the elevator shafts. Small, unimportant things.
Without which the building wouldn't stand and, if it did, would be virtually useless.
Remember, Android isn't even the base, it's just an app that runs on Linux. (Yes, the operating system in Android phones is Linux - almost all of Linux, if you install busybox, is in there.) So you get rid of - what, Linux? Then Android has nothing to run
on. Okay, so you leave Linux but get rid of Dalvik? Oops - Dalvik is what runs the apps.
All the apps, including the home pages, the app drawer - everything you see. Without Dalvik all you'd see is a black screen. Get rid of all the "AI" parts "baked in" and Bixby stops working.
If you like Samsung and Touch Wiz, buy Samsung, but most of what you're seeing is Samsung (or garbage added by your carrier), not Google. Google is mostly the stuff you
don't see. Oh, yes, Maps is in there. So you don't want navigation? (Maps navigates better than the other nav apps - it has a
much larger database to work on. But you never developed a nav app, so you won't appreciate that.)
About all that's Google that a lot of people don't need is Google Play Apps and Google Play store (and if you want to get your apps from virus-riddled sites, go ahead, but don't tell others to). The rest, on your phone, is Samsung. (And the first thing I do, after setting up a Samsung phone is install Nova, root the phone and uninstall everything Samsung. Yes, root. How anyone who runs Linux as an OS can run it without access to sudo - you can't.) Oh, you don't like the Google keyboard? Neither do I (and I'm using a Google Pixel) - Swiftkey is the second app installed.
But fracturing Android even further? Just when Google got a few manufacturers to agree to release the monthly updates
monthly (Samsung isn't one of them - they wait a few months, gather up a few updates, then release them all as one update. And you can be susceptible to all sorts of malware and chicanery until then. Samsung
gets the updates on the same schedule as everyone else - they got today's update at the beginning of August, but they don't release monthly.)
No, we had this war twice already, let's not start it again.
The poll is missing something (which is why I didn't vote):
- Better off
- Worse off
- The same
- Irrelevant
Oh, and another thing. Android, in a slightly modified form,
is already available separate from Google. It's called LineageOS. How many phones is the Oreo version available for? Not many. Pie? Maybe early 2019.
IF there's a version for your phone. The carriers are not going to work on some proprietary OS to put their junk on so the manufacturers will have to. We'll keep seeing new phones but, just like in 2000-2008, we won't keep seeing improvements to software, or improvements across the board, (It took about 4 years of yelling and screaming before we could send an MMS from one carrier to another.) But if someone like LineageOS is developing the system? How long did RIM keep Blackberry virtually unchanged except for the hardware? How long did Nokia keep Symbian the same? How long did Nextel not ask Motorola for any major software changes (except the ability to remotely read your employees' GPS locations)?
Fracture Android like that and forget about software changes. We'll get "something new" every year, from every manufacturer, but none of them will have anything to do with each other. Any other phone but BB have a trackball? Any phone but Nextel (and the failed Motorola S60 - great phone, if you don't mind the way CDMA "goes digital") have push to talk?
@
Itsa_Me_Mario:
Part of the security is that Android is mostly open source (the OS in AOSP is Open Source). No small company that takes Android over is going to release all their software, and closed source is
always less secure than open source. Android has hundreds or thousands (depends on the minute you choose) of developers picking it apart, trying to break it, trying to hack it, and reading the source looking for any little snippet of code that might be unsafe. A company with 100 developers won't have the resources to do that, so we'll see more viruses, more Trojans, more security holes like Google Play Protect open_in_new (which today's update fixes).