Google has no incentive to walk back, especially given what they saw Apple has been able to get away with on their end. And as we’ve seen with AOSP publishing delays, device tree information restrictions, locked bootloaders, they are making it increasingly hard for Android to be an OS that can be forked and installed on devices, let alone for you to install your own software.

The community ought to prepare for the realities of this, and put mitigation measures in place. Valve saw the similar direction Windows is going years ago, and made the same decision: GNU/Linux is the next best truly open/free-as-in-freedom experience, and we should all aim to use and improve that ecosystem on smaller form factors. Waydroid/ATL can act as temporary bridges for both developers and users alike while native binaries are ported.

If you’re making new apps, target to develop with qt/qml + rust so it can run on the only GNU/Linux equivalent of Android WearOS, AsteroidOS. This let’s you deploy one codebase on watches, phones, tablets, and computers screen sizes with a convergent design.