Agreed that there is a ton of baby in this bathwater.

Also, the open nature of AOSP gave Google its advantage during the early days. Since then, Google has morphed into a company that would likely not make the same decision to create an open-source OS free for others to use and contribute to.

So in the end, what we as consumers actually get, in 2026:

- Google encourages application developers to use hardware attestation to prevent themselves from running on non-blessed, third-party AOSP distributions.

- Google builds basic functionality people care about (including passkeys!) into Play Services, a closed mega-application that happens to require a Google account for most features, and is a moving target for open distributions to mimic.

- Google has closed AOSP contributions to themselves and OEM partners only. AOSP releases are now quarterly source dumps.

- OEMs which traditionally allowed bootloader unlocking (and thus actual ownership of the hardware) have removed it as a matter of policy.

So what exactly is open about Android anymore? Does "source-available OS you can see and not touch" align with your interests? Because it's increasingly not aligned with mine.