> What's currently stopping some third party from creating a fork of Android with a better store?

A huge piece of it is the network effect of starting with a store that lacks a significant number of apps available on the Play store. Sure, a competitor could, over time, grow their store to be competitive, or they could fail to tread water and go the way of Windows phones.

A competitor would have to get most/all of the phone manufacturers to all at once drop Google Play and use their ecosystem instead, otherwise no one would bother publishing apps for it. There's no way to ramp up a competitor because users won't tolerate a subpar app selection. See Amazon's Fire Phone launch for what happens when one manufacturer tries to start their own ecosystem.

It's actually very easily possible. Apart from Samsung, the largest phone manufacturers are all Chinese, and currently under sanction by the US government, with more soon on the way. Out of the Chinese bunch, the majority are Huawei. Huawei has been forced to move into a non-Playstore Android OS.

I use a burner Huawei for non-essential Android stuff. Every time I click the "Rate App" button on apps, it redirects me to Huawei store instead of Play Store. Every time I click the "Download" or "Install" button on the browser, it sends me to Huawei store. I think we can expect to see more changes in the coming two years as Android keeps updating. Huawei phones up until 2018 are allowed to use the Google SDKs but none are allowed from 2019.

The only one left behind is Samsung, which has the wherewithal to create its own (Apple clone) app store. If they go ahead with that, Google Play will be a fucking joke at that point.

i cant see how using a chinese based app store is any better than google/apple

if anything,you're more open to potential exposure of your data ,bad verification practices and CCP intelligence gathering

I didn't say that Huawei is the gold standard. Just that Huawei has already begun its own app store, and if Samsung does it too (and pushes it aggressively like Huawei does), Google Play will be done in no time.

The new Huawei phones don't have Play store or any Google services.

Galaxy store is alive and well on Samsung phones.

But they aren't taking a hard stance like Huawei. Like redirecting to their store.

When I click a play store link, it asks me which store to open it with. And I can set galaxy store as default.

On Android there are 3rd party stores. F-Droid being a popular one with FOSS apps.

Major difference is that only the Play Store can install apps in the background. That is, unless you root your phone.

Amazon tried and even with giving away hundreds of dollars in free apps every year they still failed. People just don’t want to use an alternative that has warnings of security holes.

The Google play framework is closed source and used by most apps.