> Putting aside for the moment your comments about AOSP (the timeline on the slow closing down of the source branches is a great one, particularly as you now watch more of the code move into Google Play services and the AOSP core applications be slowly obsoleted)

I don't know what you mean about AOSP source branches being closed. It's not true. They still release the entirety of every stable branch they ship on the same day that it ships. There isn't any substantial delay and they haven't started doing incomplete releases of the AOSP sources. They don't make things as easy as they should be but things haven't really gotten any better or worse overall for AOSP. It takes more work to assemble the proprietary Qualcomm code from their factory images (see https://github.com/anestisb/android-prepare-vendor) than it did before, but most other things are better now.

It's also not true that any of the core OS in AOSP has been or is being obsoleted. They've stopped maintaining some of the user-facing apps like Calendar, Email, Music and QuickSearchBox and a few providing app-layer services like text-to-speech which all have other implementations available. There's nothing they have stopped maintaining that's critical enough to really matter. There's no shortage of music apps and there are other Android text-to-speech apps, so the AOSP PicoTTS being unmaintained beyond them keeping it building / running as it did before doesn't really matter to anyone. They haven't stopped maintaining any core OS components. Many apps / components that are updated via Google Play and/or have proprietary Google service extensions are still properly maintained in AOSP without those extensions, like the Contacts, Dialer and Launcher apps. Below the application layer though, it's the same. Google builds the stock OS from the same source tree released in AOSP stable branches with their Google Play additions.

There's also the claim that code is moving into Google Play Services, but for the most part that isn't the case. Play Services has expanded but very little has been lost in AOSP. There isn't a movement of stuff to Google Play Services but rather they split out components into apps / components that they can update via Play (which doesn't hurt AOSP as they're still updated there) or they introduce new clients to proprietary server-based services. That's still what defines Play Services: clients to APIs provided by Google servers and out-of-band updates to components that are still maintained / updated in AOSP too. There are very few cases where anything has actually been dropped in favour of Play Services. I can think of a single example: voice to text. That's quite clear to anyone that has actually worked with it or used it.

You're speaking far outside your area of expertise based on anecdotes you've heard, rather than tangible facts.

> and they are not seen as high quality devices

Nexus 6 was as premium as Pixel devices, and the Nexus 6P was a quality device. Nexus 5X and 6P were the generation where Google started shipping good cameras, their own fingerprint reader setup, etc. not Pixels. Nexus 6 was a quality flagship device a year before then. There are plenty of non-Google devices that are 'open' in the same sense though.

> the vast majority of flagship devices are being made by the handful of companies that put the most effort into locking down their devices.

Not true. Vendors like Samsung sell plenty of unlocked / unlockable devices.

> If you want the "high-quality phone"--the one with the good screen and the good camera and the fast CPU that can run all of the apps that you increasingly need in this day and age--you are not buying one of the random open devices.

Not true for the reasons above. Your statements aren't based in reality.

> Again, though: I admit that Google's attempt to retake the flagship market and compete with their hardware manufacturer partners with the Pixel (a device which specifically looked at having stuff like a super high quality camera and screen and such) might change things, but this is an incredibly new development in the grand scheme of these things.

Pixels aren't a substantial departure from the Nexus 6 and Nexus 6P. Compared to the Nexus 6P, the SoC, image sensor, screen, etc. were all just moved ahead a generation. The build quality is comparable and in some ways the Nexus 6P was a nicer device: it definitely had nicer speakers, and