[RandomException]

There are already multiple separate app stores for Android and not just the Google Play. This is nothing new for Google to be honest.

And if they were to make Android a closed system, what would make me buy an Android phone instead of an iOS phone anymore? Openness is one of the biggest selling points for Android.

[scarface74]

People don’t buy Android because it’s “open” - they buy it because it’s cheap. If people cared about open, the “Year of Linux on the Desktop” would have already happened.

[RandomException]

Android is cheap and it's widely used because it's open. If manufacturers weren't able to customize it to their needs, we would still be living in a world with separate OSes for every single manufacturer. This is important especially in Asia where the market is completely different from western market. In Asia it's also very important to be able to live without Google proprietary software in Android because for example in China it's currently blocked. They are using Baidu for all the things we are using Google services for.

Year of Linux on the Desktop is hard to see since corporate users are so tightly coupled with MS ecosystem. If Microsoft could build at least equivalent mobile OS as Android or iOS, they would get pretty much all corporate customers to themselves and it would most definitely affect private customers as well. Oh, and Windows has gotten a lot better in the last 10 years so there's really no need for a basic user to change over to Linux.