Meanwhile I actually think that the OEMs have driven innovation and usability in the Android smartphone space as much as or more so than Google. Sure, some of the UI was over the top but it was a learning experience for consumers as well as for manufacturers.
That's definitely your own bubble :-)
I have bubbles where they say "stock android" to mean "AOSP + google apps", I have bubbles where "AOSP" mean "*without* google apps" (notably professionally), and I have bubbles where AOSP just means without major changes to AOSP but doesn't imply anything about whether it's using google apps or not.
Notably, I make an "AOSP" ROM which has three variants, one with Google apps, one with microg, one with nothing, and sure I have more users using the Google apps one, but that's maybe 2/3 for google apps, 1/3 for non-google apps.
> Meanwhile I actually think that the OEMs have driven innovation and usability in the Android smartphone space as much as or more so than Google. Sure, some of the UI was over the top but it was a learning experience for consumers as well as for manufacturers.
Yeah that's a pretty hard compromise to make. Nowadays, the compromise is moving hard towards "use Google-provided UX with very minimal changes", which imo reduces innovation, but most devices have pretty close UX from each other (I have a friend who moved from a OnePlus 5 Android 10 to a Samsung Galaxy A53 running Anddroid 12, the vast majority of their annoyances are because of Android 10 => Android 12 changes). A decade ago, going from one OEM to another you had very different UX (and very slow OEM UX...)