> you're stuck on Android 17, which is centuries of work ahead of literally anything else in the open source community

Honestly if this happens, look to China to maintain Android going forward and add new parallel implementations of Android 18+.

Right now almost all of China runs on various forks of AOSP; every phone manufacturer in China has their own AOSP fork (Xiaomi: MIUI/HyperOS, Huawei, HarmonyOS, TCL: TCLUI, etc.). Apps in China are distributed both as .apk files as well as through a bunch of different domestic app stores. They are compatible with all of these Android forks. These apps are also designed to be compatible with Google Android for Chinese folks overseas.

TBH China is much, much closer to "decentralized" development of Android than the Google-centric US ecosystem.

Granted most of those AOSP forks in China also often have spyware of sorts, but at least there are multiple active forks and a healthy app ecosystem working on all the forks.