Ah yeah, isn't that the definition of something you don't directly depend on? Of course they "could just replace the OS", I can also just write a new web browser and use it to browse the web as it's supposedly a standard.

Except neither will support even a fraction of the originals' capabilities, at much worse performance and millions of incompatibilities at every corner.

The kernel, not the OS.

The OS is a mix of Java, Kotlin, JavaScript, NDK APIs and the standard ISO C and ISO C++ libraries.

> Google could replace Linux kernel with something else and no one would notice, other than OEMs and people rooting their devices.

This would be better phrased If Google could replace Linux kernel with something else noone would notice,

Google have spent a decade trying to replace the Linux with something else (Fuschia), and don't seem to have gotten anywhere

Don't mistake company politics between ChromeOS, Android and Fuchsia business units, and the technical possibility of actually bothering to do so.

Also don't forget Fuchsia has been mostly a way to keep valuable engineers at Google as retention project.

They haven't been trying to replace anything as such, and Linux kernel on Android even has userspace drivers with stable ABI for Java and C++, Rust on the kernel, all features upstream will never get.

Or on Rust's case, Google didn't bother with the drama, they decided to include it, and that was it.