The biggest risk for Google is that someone else controls the mobile platform, and chooses not to give them space on this platform, or chooses not to allow them to collect the data that they need to improve their advertising.
Both are the same reasons why Google chose to build Chrome. Browsers were already a commodity, Microsoft and Netscape had seen to that long before Chrome started. So Google's strategy with Chrome can't have been commoditizing their complements. Rather, their strategy is about control of their platform, and it proved very successful. And now they are applying the same strategy with Android and the Google Play services.
And yes, my issue is not with the core open source Android code, my issue is with the final OS on my phone, which includes the Linux kernel, the Android OS, and a lot of Google tracking that I can't scrutinize or disable.
However, if Google were to start losing control of Androideither through laws or through competition (say the Amazon Android phone had taken off and squeezed Google Play out of the market) I can guarantee you that Google investment in Android would slow to a crawl. Google doesn't need a commodity OS on mobile. Google needs to control as much as possible of the mobile phone platform.
In the end, all I can say is "if you are so worried about Google's Android, go ahead fight the good fight, get a Fairphone with a custom ROM without g-services, or with any other OS. Asking for Android as a whole to be killed is short-sighted and will not achieve anything"
The problem of oversimplifying some concepts is that we end up with absurd statements like this accepted as fact.
> Android makes money for Google by achieving that.
You are confusing tactics with strategy. Android is not a tactic, it is strategy. (Please do read the link I posted before)
> F/OSS is not a good in itself
Yeah, well, that is just, like, your opinion, man. For plenty of people there is a lot of inherit value associated with Software being Libre. The mere fact that I can take a fork of Android, remove the G-Services part that I don't like and install it on a rootable device, while not being able to do the same with iOS, is an concrete example of that.
> A F/OSS data collection program is exactly as bad as a proprietary data collection program.
Your issue here is not with Android, rather with the myriad of other Google Services that come in the OS. I am failing to understand why you keep conflating the two. Are you also going to start asking for Google to stop contributing to the Linux kernel because they use it on Android and their servers?