That's the crux of it. Though Google have fixed it in such a way that's benefited them by consolidating services and potential data collection for revenue rais

That's the crux of it. Though Google have fixed it in such a way that's benefited them by consolidating services and potential data collection for revenue raising. I've not used anything but a Nexus of Pixel in years. But carrier fragmentation (and with it, the difficulty for OTA patching!) is a much bigger risk to the Android ecosystem and it's uses than closed source code.