There is no reason to hard fork, as long as Google contributes to AOSP without breaking it.
Regulators in the US decided that Android did not have to be split from Google, but they could theoretically decide that Google is not allowed to break AOSP to gain a competitive advantage. Not that it would matter: TooBigTech is too powerful to care about regulations anyway.
Nobody really want a hard fork, if you can't run Android apps, you might as well use a Linux distribution.
Well the idea would be to run Android apps on the hard fork :-).
If you can run Android apps then you need the same behavior as AOSP or I'm missing something?
If you don't rebase from AOSP, the apps won't run pretty quickly.
I actually wonder: if Google stopped pushing to AOSP and "the community" had to fork... the whole Android SDK/NDK is not open source, so I wonder if AOSP could survive at all without Google, even though it is open source.
I think if Google would stop pushing AOSP, there's a very high risk for Google that a consortium of manufacturers would continue themselves as they need it and they would lose control.
It doesn't have to be. Most of Android is fine.
Outside of China, to a first approximation no one once to use an Android device without Google Play Services.
I would love to, for the record.
That's not a hard fork. They always rebase on top of AOSP when there's a new AOSP source release