Nothing I didn’t really know in the article, thanks for posting though. I know Naomi Campbell pushes Brave pretty hard. Any thoughts on that?

Link appears to not work. At least for me

Android is open source software that is primarily developed by Google but is free for anyone to use. However the play store and associated apps are Google proprietary software. Usually manufacturers that want to run Android also want to have the play store as that’s where a good portion of the apps are. So the Google is in the phone from the time you purchase it.

However you can run Android without Google proprietary software and there are many different ROMs (like how Linux has many distros) that are created without using any Google software. This can be limiting if you rely on Google services or sometimes apps (banking etc) verify themselves via the play store and won’t work otherwise.