A good reason why google play services exists is to stop things like this. Its a complex moving target that gets updated monthly. Sure, you can do this with app

A good reason why google play services exists is to stop things like this. Its a complex moving target that gets updated monthly. Sure, you can do this with apps that don't use play services, but a lot do, especially popular ones. MS would have a hard time keeping up with changes. Blackberry tried this and it didn't save the Blackberry product. They pretty much gave up recently and now have an excellent android phone on the market. The real question is how many competitive app stores can we have at once? We're probably looking at some level of natural duopoly here. It took years for Android to get the attention it did and that's with it being a worldwide leader in sales. The market settled on a product that's perceived as premium (iOS) and the workhorse do-anything, install-anywhere, sell cheap, etc Android. A third app store and the developer time/cost commitments needed might not be feasible. MS should know a thing or two about how hard it is for outsiders to break natural monopolies.