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.

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