I hope they dont go that way. The amount of engineering effort required to do that would be immense and it would be a constant game of playing catch up to android to ensure that all APKs work.
Disclaimer: Views expressed here are my own and do not have anything to do with my employer.
The way I'd do it, is support the kernel extensions needed (or some wrapper) for the android specific stuff and leave it to the community to start actually making things work. There's a lot of research and work already done out in the android community to strip off a lot of the google play stuff from android and leave you with a functional device. I suspect that a lot of that would make the job easier on the software side. The API side (display, sound, etc.) will probably be a lot more difficult but it has been done in the past. Google's done this with ARC Welder and running some APKs in Chrome. Not sure if it's open sourced or not but if it is then it'd probably handle a good part of the work.
Amount of engineering effort involved here would be immense and its unclear if a startup could achieve this and keep up with the developer/ecosystem velocity of Android.
Disclaimer: Views expressed here are my own and do not have anything to do with my employer.
Disclaimer: Views expressed here are my own and do not have anything to do with my employer.