Windows Phone used to be a thing. Quite a good base UI but a shortage of apps, because it couldn't run Android apps.

It wasn't the lack of apps that held me from buying one, it was that they never advertised one or had enough Windows Phones available on my carrier with good battery life. I'm sure they had amazing battery life but they didn't advertise it well enough if they did.

I still use my Lumia 650 as 2nd phone.

It runs the apps I care about, and keeps getting OS updates, unlike my Android devices.

What a weird stage we’re in currently. The continued effort by the parent company to maintain basic updates and patch security holes in a delivered product is a differentiating feature. We’re literally considering whether a company is going to ghost it’s cumstomers as an optional thing.

I still have a Windows Phone at home that can sideload Android apps. Was pretty awesome. Android apps seemed slow in comparison to UWP apps, but ran more or less as well as they ran on Androids.

You can already experience non-Andorid Android in the form of a Pixel Slate.

Including the pixelbook and many other ChromeOS devices