A good reason why google play services exists is to stop things like this. Its a complex moving target that gets updated monthly. Sure, you can do this with apps that don&#x27;t use play services, but a lot do, especially popular ones. MS would have a hard time keeping up with changes.  Blackberry tried this and it didn&#x27;t save the Blackberry product. They pretty much gave up recently and now have an excellent android phone on the market.<p>The real question is how many competitive app stores can we have at once? We&#x27;re probably looking at some level of natural duopoly here. It took years for Android to get the attention it did and that&#x27;s with it being a worldwide leader in sales. The market settled on a product that&#x27;s perceived as premium (iOS) and the workhorse do-anything, install-anywhere, sell cheap, etc Android. A third app store and the developer time&#x2F;cost commitments needed might not be feasible.  MS should know a thing or two about how hard it is for outsiders to break natural monopolies.