How Google Could Eliminate the Amazon Threat to Android | Hacker News Reader

How Google Could Eliminate the Amazon Threat to Android

pathikshah.com

9 pointspathik8 comments

This is a very tech-centric view of the world.

Even assuming (probably incorrectly) that the (very cheap, low powered) Fire is capable of running ICS well, most people don't want to flash ROMs even if it is easy. They worry about it going wrong, they worry about warranties and support.

And most people neither know nor care what ICS is. They want to read some books, surf the web and watch some movies. They're not going to see why ICS is better.

And people like the close Amazon content integration which this would remove. They like dealing with a retailer they can trust in ways that are pain free. Google have a very limited history as a retailer. Even if they put their own content delivery in place of Amazon's people don't know and trust them in this space in the same way they trust Amazon.

This move would give a small number of geeks access to a low cost ICS tablet, it would do nothing to turn around the vast majority of Fire users.

Just read TFA and you read my mind. ICS would probably run like a dog on the hardware, and most true geeks will probably want more than 8GB storage to play with without access to cloud storage. Nice idea but 99% of the people a Fire probably don't even know it is running Android.

"ICS would probably run like a dog on the hardware,"

There is already an ICS ROM for the Kindle Fire. It's pre-release -has touch, wifi, sound but no gpu acceleration yet- so it's probably not a good indicator of performance. You can find a build as well videos on xda: http://forum.xda-developers.com/forumdisplay.php?f=1309

In short, most users won't choose ICS just because it's easy to install.

Assuming they even know what ICS is then not at the expense of their warranty, support, Amazon integration.

Makes no sense. People aren't buying the Fire because they want a nice, inexpensive tablet. Hardware wise, it's very similar to a lot of existing tablets (that hardly anyone wants). People are buying the Fire because of the tight integration with Amazon. Installing Android 4, no matter how easy, will ruin that integration.

Out of curiosity, does 'competition' always mean 'enemy'?

"... it can focus on its main enemy – the Apple iPad"

That would be an even bigger attack on the Android ecosystem than making their own tablet. What that would say to other manufacturers is "If you build your own hard+software system on top of Android we will try to steal your users from you."

Google knew, or should have known, when they released Android the way they did that something like this might happen.

"Make it extremely easy to install Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich on the Kindle Fire. Launch a one-click flashing tool to flash an Android 4.0 ROM on the Kindle Fire. "

There is already an easy process to install ROMs on the Kindle Fire, including a per-alpha ICS one. The tool is here: http://teamw.in/project/twrp

A guide to use it is here: http://techwalls.com/gadget/how-to-install-android-4-0-ice-c... (workaounds no longer needed)

The ROM is being developed on XDA: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1379208&...

Video of pre-alpha ROM: http://moooom.dyndns.info/?p=107

Reply on news.ycombinator.com