I actually wonder: if Google stopped pushing to AOSP and "the community" had to fork... the whole Android SDK/NDK is not open source, so I wonder if AOSP could survive at all without Google, even though it is open source.
I think if Google would stop pushing AOSP, there's a very high risk for Google that a consortium of manufacturers would continue themselves as they need it and they would lose control.
I think that is unlikely reality because from manufacturers perspective they don't get AOSP from the public. They get it from their chip provider like Qualcomm who gets private releases from Google. Everything is already set up such that people aren't using the public version, so the more likely reality is that the public version goes away, and google partners keep doing what they are doing. Maybe things are different on the Chinese side of things. So if it were to be created, it would be over there.
Would they, though? Like Huawei forked for a while, and then they made their proprietary HarmonyOS.
For a while I thought it was a missed opportunity to compete on a hard fork, but then I realised that Huawei probably cannot fork the Android SDK/NDK because it's not open source.
