Google Play can be rewritten from scratch to look like the real one and point to open source repositories, but the real hassle are device drivers: they're tight closed to the point there's not a single person in the world who managed to install a 100% open OS on a phone or tablet; even Purism themselves had to use some closed blobs here and there. Closed firmware/blobs/drivers are the #1 problem; that's the battle to send more troops to, not play stores or apps. The day we eradicate them from devices is the day we can consider those devices really open and trustworthy, the day no entity in the world, not even the original manufacturers, can suddenly decide to make a device obsolete forcing the user to buy a new one.

What about the baseband?

I understand carriers don't want the average Joe to mess with the radio, I'd be totally ok with that, so I would agree on closed source firmware on baseband if it was limited only to that use: a fully separated system that deals with connections and nothing else. All data could be en/decrypted on main device CPU, so that the radio closed firmware would essentially have full access to noise. Of course IP addresses could not be masked, but they would be available anyway to authorities with full access to cell towers and traffic.

Huawei could make their own Play Services, API-compatible with Google, then all apps would work the same. Maybe that's what they actually do now.

As the article says, Amazon spent _years_ trying this approach and ultimately failed with their phone project.

So sure it's possible, but it's not as easy as you perhaps think?

Oh man, the Fire Phone has so many problems as a product. As someone who turned a large Android Google Play app into a Fire Phone compatible one, I think it took me literally a day to swap out the Google Maps implementation with the Amazon Maps one and that was very nearly it. I'm convinced that the hijacking the swipe to go home was the real killer of that thing. I honestly don't know how people actually used that thing because scrolling on any list in any app basically left you with 50:50 odds of heading back to the home page.

I'm not stating that the problem isn't hard, just that the Fire Phone had other issues.

Amazon tried to make their own copy of Play Store, not Play Services.

Huawei already does this in China, where Google services are blocked.

Their problem isn't implementing these things. Their problem is convincing non-Chinese developers to port their apps to Huawei's ecosystem.

Well, yes, but maybe the failure was more due to not many users being willing to accept that much vendor lock-in, rather than issues with Amazon's Android version?

Amazon's phone failed because it was a new product in a very crowded market that didn't offer anything new of significance.

Aw c'mon, it's just software.