No, they could have avoided this outcome by not paying other companies to not compete with Google play. They paid off phone manufacturers like Motorola to not preinstall third party app stores and software companies like Riot Games to not produce third party app stores.
OP is saying they could also have avoided this outcome by not allowing competition at all. That's the route that Apple took and Apple won their case against Epic.
Google's plan was to maintain a de facto monopoly on app stores while technically allowing competition. Apple's was to just come out and say that they were the only authorized app store and therefore they can't be anti-competitive because there exists no market for iOS app stores.
Google is probably wishing they had taken that route now.
I think itβs tough to guess what would have happened if Google had been more proactive about locking down some parts of android earlier. Though I will speculate that android would have seen much less widespread adoption if they had been more restrictive
