[skybrian]

It goes deeper than that. Many (most?) Android apps depend on Play Services. If there were an option to remove it, it would basically be a "break most of my phone" option.

To make this viable, at a minimum, it should be possible to search for apps that don't depend on Play Services, so you could remove most of your apps and replace them with alternatives.

But I expect most users wouldn't do this, and so there is little incentive for most apps to stop depending on Play Services. The only real incentive to do it is to be able to publish the app on Amazon.

[chopin]

I think on f-droid you can find only apps which are not dependent on Play Services.