Neither Microsoft, Nokia, nor anyone else should fork Android. It’s unforkable. | Ars :
AOSP is far more than the basic bones of a smartphone operating system. It is a complete
smartphone operating system. The examples you provide for what it
includes are very misleading -- what about the launcher, contacts app,
dialer and phone app, calendar app, camera and gallery and on? The fact
is, if you build AOSP today and put it on a phone, you will have a
pretty fully functioning platform.
The thing you don’t have is
stuff related to cloud services, and this is not an evil secret plan of
Google, but a simple fact we have been clear about from the initial
design of the platform: Android as an open-source platform simply can’t
provide any cloud services, because those don’t run on the device where
the platform code runs. This is a key point that seems to be completely
missed. If you want to understand what Android is, how it is designed,
and how the pieces fit together, you must understand this point.
One
of the things that is interesting about platforms today vs. the
traditional desktop is that these cloud services are becoming
increasingly central to the core platform experience. This presents a
special challenge to an open-source platform, which can’t really provide
such cloud services as part of the standard platform implementation.
In Android our solution to this is to design the platform so that cloud
services can plug-in and integrated with it in various ways