I don’t see what the problem is with forking Android. If it’s truly an open project then tough bungies for Google if it gets forked. If Google had truly wanted to prevent that and retain total control then they should never have made Android open in any way whatsoever. However, Google wanted to stop Apple from dominating the mobile device market so they came up with Android and made it an open project. We can debate just how open it really is (certainly not as much as Firefox OS or Ubuntu), but the fundamental truth is that Android isn’t iOS or Windows. It is forkable, though not necessarily in an easy way.