I'm telling you, Android is dead as a platform. Google is going to eventually close source AOSP and pay a fine for it, or something like that, and then Android will no longer be an open source project. Because of this, I am moving to NuraEco (formerly PostMarketOS) for my next phone.

I would argue that a conservative (few new features, focus on security and stability) Android fork would be possible to maintain.

I'm telling you, Android is in fact not a dead platform. While the recent chances have been unfortunate, the community around around is still quite strong. Android still has the advantage of being far more mature than anything else due to it having years worth of research and development put into it. No matter what Google does the community will continue to build cool things. Even with delayed releases and a increasing closed Google ecosystem it still makes far more sense to use something that is well developed rather than starting from scratch. Linux on mobile is largely a pipe dream as a lot of the mobile stuff is just ports of desktop software. Linux desktops have far weaker security and privacy protections are have the issue of carrying over a significant amount of technical dept.

It only makes sense up until they close it off truly and we lose the ability to trust our devices because we know Google is inherently untrustworthy and can't be trusted to act without supervision.

Until Google breaks the way APKs installed and it will no longer work on the previous system. Yes.

I have already heard at least the rumblings of an initiative to harden NuraEco to a similar point as Graphene OS.

I don't care about what Google does. I'm using a Pixel tablet with GOS without any Google play. My phone is a GOS Pixel with Play sandboxed. If Google really wants it I'll kill my very old Google account.

What I am saying is that Google can close source Android and then break the way apps install and then force people to use a newer version of Android than what AOSP has access to.

In fact, newer versions of Android already have that where it will not install an application under a specific Android version no matter what.

I don't care what Google does with Android as long as a viable hard (vs soft, as with GrapheneOS) fork will emerge. I am not using Google's software sources, so Google has no power there.

If Google closes Android's source code and then breaks the way applications install, developers are going to develop their applications for the way Google has theirs set up, not the way it works currently. And therefore, you will begin losing access to applications as time goes on.

Not the open source applications. These are the only ones I use.

The logic is strange, why should I need Windows and its ecosystem if I already have Linux and Debian?

That would depend on whether the open source developers are going to continue developing for what was previously Android or what is currently Android. I guess it would depend on what market they're after.

If that's the case, then its name would have to change, because otherwise, if you search for Help Developing Android Apps, then you're going to get Google's locked down version of Android, whatever it ends up being. So, if it's Graphene OS, or Lineage OS, or whatever, it will have to be named something other than Android Open Source Project.