Big companies lost interest in licensing many year ago. Few companies have interest manufacturing Nexuses for Google these days, and smaller companies would get no chances at all.

HTC was the last big OEM amicable to co-branding or white label terms. They tried to build an own brand, and failed miserably because they failed to perceive how marketing works in the West. Maybe they will get more agreeable again.

Yeah, indeed, I'd wonder what'd happen if you asked i.e. oneplus to make a version of a model very open and start hacking away. Perhaps you can even convince them there is a market or that it is worth the experiment. Or would they fear Google?

Googles Android license forbids this.

Are you saying that manufacturers that produce hardware that runs android are banned from also selling hardware (being an OEM manufacturer) that does not run android (that doesn't fly with e.g. Samsung making TVs with their OS and Sony making cameras that runs non-android I guess)?

Somehow it doesn't seem possible to prevent HTC from building one smartphone and sell it either themselves or via another brand as an android phone, while at the same time selling the same design (screen peripherals etc) with some minor chages, maybe a slightly different SoC, to someone who wants to sell a phone with a different OS? How exactly would the license forbid it?

Obviously google owns the license and can probably unilaterally revoke it for anything they see as unpleasant (such as building OEM phones that run linux, instead of just TVs that do?) - but is this really expressed explicitly in their agreement? How?

> Are you saying that manufacturers that produce hardware that runs android are banned from also selling hardware (being an OEM manufacturer) that does not run android

It is the other way around companies that produce Google Android phones (with play store) are banned from producing anything Android not based on Googles stack. Amazon had to find out the hard way that basing your OS on Android makes it hard to find a manufacturer.

Of course this is not globally true. Various countries already informed Google just what they thought of that kind of licensing abuse. That led to Google carving out new licensing regions for every lawsuit and outright boycotting Turkey when they mandated the same treatment as the EU.

So no problem for a manufacturer to build a oem phone running a non-Android Linux then? It has no relation to Android if it runs a non-Android OS?

Or is there a

What part of it does it forbid? You could relicense the existing SW stack, no?

You can't produce a custom design based on Android since nearly all manufacturers signed a License agreement to only sell Android phones blessed by Google, this is required to sell even one phone with the Google software stack. Amazon already went through that with its Kindle product line.