Look at Amazon and their Fire TV platform. It’s just android, with all of the Google stuff stripped out.

Sure, Google may not be getting any money for that, but they are getting more dev time and attention on the open source parts of Android which helps to solidify the base of the OS which helps them.

And Android got popular because it was open and manufacturers could build phones that support it without necessarily needing to involve Google (or at least without needing to certify it or meet strict standards) which let the platform grow significantly. If Google closed it up today it would likely cause a fork in the Android platform ecosystem and you’d end up with “Google Android” on pixel and “Open Android” on all others.

Sorry I don’t have any suggestions, but I’m very curious about your use case. What led you to needing this?

Are you doing web dev with just a phone? Impressive

Probably some kind of wallpaper app then? Or maybe a video call app downloading backgrounds?

You could try limiting files permissions on a bunch of apps to see what gets them to stop.