Ie, the excellent bitslide

Android is heavily integrated with the hardware, but there are distributions that are de-googled by quite a bit.

https://itsfoss.com/open-source-alternatives-android/

Well, yes really. The fact is the average person does not ever want to see a command line interface or have to modify configuration files or any of that. They want to double click on a button labeled "internet" and suddenly there's the internet. For all of the things Linux is good at, there are still way to many little annoying quirks that keep it from achieving that real seamless ease of use that the average person really wants. And we know they want it because they keep using Microsoft products that are buggy and fail all the time, but they appear to work, so people choose them because they're easier. People use Apple products despite being nerfed walled-garden Playskool versions of things because it's easy. Linux hasn't pulled that off. And even 99% of the way there isn't enough. There's always that "Oh it works fine but...". And that but is that your backlit laptop keyboard didn't light up because the driver file doesn't support that so you Vim your way into a configuration file and change a few lines to get it to work, or your Wifi doesn't work every time you turn it on so you had to create a blacklist file to tell it to skip over some commands that were inadvertently shutting it off on boot, or dozens of other tiny little quirks that generally in and of themselves are not a big deal, but they are annoying. And annoying is generally one of the quickest ways to turn someone off. The internet could break on your Windows laptop several times a week, but all you have to do is run "Troubleshoot problems" and it fixes itself or you can have it be broken on your Linux machine, and if you edit some files and find a repository with out of date driver files that still work and force it to use one of those, it fixes it permanently but you have to do it in terminal. The average person will choose to live with Windows breaking their internet over and over as long as the "fix" is quick and easy rather than wade into the scary intimidating Linux stuff, even if objectively it works way better. And the various teams that make Linux distros haven't quite figured that out yet. Ubuntu is close, way closer than most and damn near ready for the vast majority of people to use it seamlessly. But until they iron out those last few remaining "Well....you can do that, but you'd have to change this file and overwrite this one, and then change your boot configuration via GRUB, then make sure this script is set to run in the background on boot with elevated permissions...but other than that it all works", they're not going to achieve that true Windows replacement status.

Same with phones. If you're on Android, you can probably have a de-Googled OS tonight. But when people start reading "Well first you have to follow these steps to enable Developer Mode, then see if the 5th to last digit in the model number is an X or a Q, if it is you need Odin 3.14, if it's Y or W, you need Odin 3.12, and if it's anything else, you need Kingroot. Then you need to download adb tools and reboot your phone into fastboot, and make sure you wipe Davlik Cache, but make sure you don't do that before having the sideloaded driver files running OR YOU WILL BRICK YOUR PHONE"...and then they see there are another 20 steps just like that after that, several of them with YOU WILL BRICK YOUR PHONE IF YOU... warnings, and people get scared and say fuck it.

That's how it is with a lot of this stuff. It's all possible. It's just a pain in the ass. Certainly doable, but just enough quirks and complicated steps to follow to get it to do exactly what you need that people say fuck it and go with Windows or iOS. It might be a censored, nerfed, retarded, buggy, slow, mess that sends all of your data back to Micorsoft or Apple...but it's easy. And most people choose "easy" over "good" 10 times out of 10.

They use a modified Google OS. But they have their own app store I believe