Is it really Google's Android? I have the feeling it's mostly Chinese manufacturers with their own Android versions sans the Google services.

Android is still developed by google, yes.

The chinese are mostly adding skins on top, not developing the core of the operating system.

There is however a chinese fork of android (state sponsored), but it has not gotten wide market adoption in china either to my knowledge, but i dont live in china so i'm open to be corrected.

Finally, even if that OS has gotten widely adopted in china - it IS a fork. the changes are not being upstreamed to android, hence irrelevant to the discussion on this forum.

I'm talking about the Google services which is where Google profits. Chinese phones ship without them. When I said "Google's Android", I meant Android+Google Services. The people buying cheap Android phones are most likely not buying Pixels. Even Samsungs aren't exactly cheap anymore. I'm not talking about Android forks. I'm talking about customized Android without Google services.

The biggest Android market (internationally) are Chinese phones. If Google suddenly decided Play Store should be the only way to install apps, that doesn't affect Huawei and Xiaomi phones at all, they don't ship with Play Store and Play Services in the first place.

Chinese phones sold in China ship without Google services. Chinese phones sold outside of China include them.

That's false. The ones you can get here in Slovenia don't have them. I've personally helped quite a few friends sideload them. I also remember how shocked people were to find out there's no YouTube or Play Store after buying a Huawei or Xiaomi phone when that first came into effect.

Correct, same in Germany. Here is a photo I shot last December in an electronics store. Aurora Store is now official, I guess.

https://imgur.com/a/v6zaRYo

I don't think that picture indicates in any way that there are no Google Services on those phones. I've had multiple Chinese phones, and all of them had both their in-house app store (every brand seems to have their own) and also the Google Play Store. And obviously things like Google Play Services and Google Maps are installed too, way too many Android apps wouldn't work without them

This isn't even a China-exclusive strategy, Samsung does the same with their Galaxy Store.

Aurora Store is not a separate app store but is an alternative front-end to the Google Play Store. Combined with microG it should be possible to get all the Google apps.

There must be a reason why Aurora Store is being advertised, though. Why would they do that if they could just pre-install Google Play Store and standard Google applications.

Update: End of 2018, I bought a Huawei phone with GApps. I remember that two or three generations later, Huawei was not allowed to include GApps anymore.

Huawei is the exception due to specific sanctions on Huawei.

Probably because they are bootleg imports in a very small country.

Chinese telephones legally imported usually have them in most relevant big markets like Indonesia, India, Brazil, etc.

So the national carrier importing them and selling them in their brick-and-mortar stores is "bootleg imports"? Not to mention that the EU is, legally speaking, a single market so the same rules should apply everywhere.

The reason they probably have them preinstalled over there is because they don't care about licensing so they can freely preload whatever they want. At least that's how it was with netbooks in the early 2000s that they were selling loaded with MS Office, Windows, even Adobe, of course with no COA stickers.

When they sell them in China, yes.

But the same manufacturers sell Android phones with Play services in Europe, Japan, India, Indonesia, etc.