Split it to a point where no one company can own the entire Internet ecosystem. Apply antitrust laws to keep it like this.

Maybe the development will slow down, but let's be honest: we would still be fine if Android and iOS had stopped "improving" years ago. Now it's mostly about adding shiny AI features and squeeze the users.

A year or so ago, I would have agreed. Not anymore.

Sure, a company can buy Chrome and proceed to sell user browsing habits data to the highest bidder, or use it as a backbone for decentralized scraping - backed by real user data and real residential IPs to fool most anti-scraping checks. But if they fuck with users enough, Chrome would just die off over time, and Firefox or various Chromium forks like Brave would take its place. This already happened to the browsing titan that was IE, and without the entire power of Google to push Chrome? It can happen again.

The alternative is Google owning Chrome for eternity - and proceeding with the most damaging initiatives possible. Right now, Google is seeking to destroy adblocking, tighten the control over the ad data ecosystem to undermine their competitors, and who knows what else they'll come up with next week.

Either the new company takes over maintaining Android, or it fumbles the bag and the development becomes less centralized for a while - until some leader emerges and takes over.

Either way, the new control center of Android wouldn't be Google. A decade ago, I would have seen that as a bad thing. Now, I'm almost certain that this would be a change for the better. Google is not what it once was.

Android only ever had a chance because it is one ecosystem. Developers aren't going to develop for five slightly-different ecosystems in a trench coat.

It is a shame that those companies don't contribute to AOSP (or fork it). Apparently Huawei decided that they would do better alone with their own HarmonyOS, but I don't get it. It could be so powerful if AOSP was actually shared between the Android manufacturers...

I would happily leave Android and go with such a fork. Instead, each (Samsung, Huawei, ...) try to make their own thing. And good luck to them to beat Android on their own.

So you want a $100 feature phone that has serious security features like monthly security patches and dedicated security coprocessors? It's tough to make the economics of that work out. All the serious security features costs money to implement, either in the form of development costs or added costs to the BOM. Those costs can be absorbed if you're selling a $600 phone, but not a $100 phone. If you try to add those features to a $100 phone, it'll end up making the phone more expensive, which means nobody but security freaks would buy your phone, and you lose economies of scale that's needed to make a phone at all.

Back to your point, there's already a "split of hardware and software" in the PC market, and we know how it works out. Security there is a joke. Windows might be getting monthly security patches, but the same can't be said of the panoply of third party drivers/firmware. Whenever microsoft tries to push for better security they get shouted down by people claiming it's some sort of conspiracy to implement DRM.