The Free part of Android is part of the reason it won. Windows Phone OEMs couldn't modify the system, while OEMs like Samsung could (and at the time, did) heavily modify the OS.

That's presumably why my 2016 Civic used Android under the hood instead of QNX. The latter would be faster and more responsive, but Android is free, easy enough to force into the shape Honda needed, and possibly even gave them an easier time finding people familiar with the more inner workings of the OS.

Android without the closed source Google parts is pretty useless for the average consumer. E.g. just having each app open a persistent connection in the background for it to receive notifications instead of one centralized one is pretty bad for battery life.

There is a little country called China that you might have heard of that has plenty of manufacturers selling AOSP based phones with no Google software.