This is just wrong. Android forks were never successful (see eg Amazon's fire phone) an will never be - the lock-in factor is incredible.

In the opposite direction, more and more customers want "pure" software and good hardware is increasingly available from many different manufacturers. Nokia arguably has made the best hardware and hardly sold any phones with WP because customers wanted Android. Google knows this and moves more and more parts from AOSP in its proprietary play framework because manufacturers are way more dependent on Android than Google is dependent on any single manufacturer (including Samsung).