Android without the mothership

While I often am not nearly as concerned as many about the GNU definition of open source, I think it is very important for there to be the option to avoid all these vendor specific lock ins.

Even if few people actually opt out, as long as the ability is there it helps to make sure companies don't go too far in their data mining.

BTW another option is Firefox OS, which is also based on android with the primary difference being replacing the android desktop with a lighter html5 based desktop.... not as feature rich as android, but for many people more then sufficient.