Without Play Store it's not viable/interesting. Also, it's so. much. work. keeping up with Android releases, even inside Google. Wear and ChromeOS are always a version or two behind, and vast majority of the time, it is two versions.
If Google internally wasn't helpful enough to each other, I can't imagine they played nice with Microsoft on this.
The broad business war means there's no incentive for VPs to drive it.
Technical challenges via CTS* mean there's no incentive for 1-3 steps up the org chart to enable it.
The narrow-er business challenge of not having the Play Store is the final nail for any cooperation. I don't think Google is interested in proactively collaborating unless you do CTS.
* Android's CTS, compatibility test suite, has to be passed to get the Play Store, and broadly, it is organized around individual device launches, rather than a subsystem than can run on any hardware.
(n.b. I worked on Wear then Android at Google, 6 years total)
I could be wrong, but I thought passing CTS is only one of the steps to be able to advertise a device as powered by android. To get Play Store which requires GMS, there are additioinal test suites like GTS.
Without Play Store it's not viable/interesting. Also, it's so. much. work. keeping up with Android releases, even inside Google. Wear and ChromeOS are always a version or two behind, and vast majority of the time, it is two versions.
If Google internally wasn't helpful enough to each other, I can't imagine they played nice with Microsoft on this.
The broad business war means there's no incentive for VPs to drive it.
Technical challenges via CTS* mean there's no incentive for 1-3 steps up the org chart to enable it.
The narrow-er business challenge of not having the Play Store is the final nail for any cooperation. I don't think Google is interested in proactively collaborating unless you do CTS.
* Android's CTS, compatibility test suite, has to be passed to get the Play Store, and broadly, it is organized around individual device launches, rather than a subsystem than can run on any hardware.
(n.b. I worked on Wear then Android at Google, 6 years total)