Why did Ben Evans suddenly discover, about three years too late, that Android is open source and powering all kind of weird experiments? Is it to do with his new job?

I think the point is that the market is cheerfully generating super cheap Android phones without any help from the Mozilla foundation.

Yes, and that's a entirely fair observation, but he's been full of these "amazing" stories about cheap android, and its use in developing nations for the last few months. That didn't just happen, and he presumably knew about it before, because that's his full-time job, so what changed?

I'm not trying to promote Benedict Evans as some kind of guru, merely quoting him as a source of information (rather than pulling something out of my ass). I usually find him reliable if not revelatory.