Free as in freedom and not free beer indeed. I mean I don't mind some proprietary uses of Open Source (how else will you fund the project!) but there should be limits to how you do this. I prefer extra paid features / paid support. Google could of made Android a proper Linux distro and charged manufacturers for OS package releases / updates or something of the sort, something reasonable. I wish Android was more Linux like where I can install w/e I want without being forced anything specifically. Replace the UI completely as I so desire as well.

Android is really a good image of what happens when Google design something from top to bottom according to what they want. There's a tiny piece of it open-sourced, the bare minimum and everything else around is closed source. They made sure that the whole ecosystem is complicated and convoluted enough that you can't easily modify it for yourself.

We could have had a Linux distribution tailored for mobile, instead we get that mess that is Android.

To put it less crypticly, the AOSP maintainer left because AOSP was capable of running on exactly zero android devices, including Google's own flagship devices.