Agreed. Given the direction Google has gone with Android (and it sure looks like they're working hard to try to kill it off in favor of something they control

Agreed. Given the direction Google has gone with Android (and it sure looks like they're working hard to try to kill it off in favor of something they control completely like Chrome OS/Fuchsia/whatever) it would be great to inject some actual competition into the mobile marketplace. The current Apple/Google duopoly isn't getting it done for me. > somehow Google has managed to bill Android as "free." Unfortunately, Google got away with telling a whopper of a lie in that they were building a free and open platform when behind the scenes they were doing anything but. Maybe it was true in the first year or two but hasn't been the case this decade (i.e. the ODM agreements prohibiting non-Google flavors of Android which are pretty much the reason it's so difficult to find non-Google flavored devices based on the 'open' Android platform. IIRC, Amazon only managed to get it done by going to the few contract manufacturers who weren't already making any Google authorized devices for anyone else.)