AOSP absolutely is a massive success. The fact that all of these Android handset manufacturers exist today, is thanks to AOSP. The fact that Android is a major competitor to the Apple ecosystem, is thanks to AOSP.

I think the biggest criticism we can say is AOSP has not taken off like Linux with different forks being maintained and parallel, mostly because people who are using AOSP want to sell devices and not maintain an operating system.... If AOSP was LGPL, and all of the manufacturers who fork it, had to release their code openly, that would be interesting... Heck, if Google required open bootloaders, and the ability to secure bootloaders, to get Google Play services on the phone. We would see a massive amount of user empowerment in the entire ecosystem....

I think the biggest excitement we see for companies to fork AOSP is when they want to try to make their own walled garden like Google Play, like the app store.... So we see this with Samsung, the Chinese phones etc.

As long as Google does the heavy lifting of AOSP I don't think we're going to see major commercial forks, nobody got rich duplicating Google's work they give away for free.

I am very thankful that AOSP exists so we can get programs like replicant, and graphene OS. And will I love these projects, if AOSP stop getting updates tomorrow, there is not enough momentum for these projects to survive on their own, so they're more like very enthusiastic skins that depend on AOSP updates rather than independent operating systems.

Betteridge says, "No."

Consumers? Probably no. Geeks and hackers? Damn yes!

AOSP was never about consumers. Google used it as a trojan horse to gain massive marketshare and use it as a platform to run their surveillance software on the biggest possible scale.

The fact that it's open source helped AOSP succeed at first and gave Google a good corporate image. Then, slowly over the years, Google moved more and more open-source features behind their proprietary stack, and now AOSP is only nominally open source: look at the state of the dialer, the contact list... in a vanilla AOSP installation, like on most deGoogle phones: it's quite pathetic compared to modern, privacy-invading phones.

So yes: AOSP has failed consumers because it was designed to serve Google and nobody else from the get-go.

The AOSP is a huge success and phones are really only the tip of the iceberg, android runs everywhere and is basically responsible for the mainstream adoption of "smart" devices.

It's a small OS that runs on basically anything and you can stick it on most computers regardless of how strange the hardware setup is.

Is it perfect? No, as a project android is basically maintained by Google alone and Google obviously doesn't think it's perfect, or fuschia wouldn't exist.