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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

> Lowpass hints at Vega’s reliance on React Native for app development, a framework born from the Meta realms. This choice suggests Amazon’s ambition for cross-platform prowess, harmonizing app development across iOS and Android. While the report doesn’t explicitly address Vega’s potential migration to Fire tablets, one can’t help but wonder if this Linux-based revelation might unlock new dimensions for Amazon’s versatile devices.

Ironically Android started out with JavaScript, and due to performance they pivoted into Java, if I remember correctly.

I bet it will be the usual mostly written in C++, with JavaScript as kind of GUI markup language, actually.

As that is the way many seem to use React Native, as a cheap alternative to QML / Qt.

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This is the direction React Native is heading, with Fabric Native Components[1] and Turbo Native Modules[2]. On the development side, you have JavaScript, the language we all love to hate and hate to love, with its vast ecosystem of readily available libraries that are well-documented and used daily by billions of people. On the functionality side, you have access to native code, which speeds up and lightens the workload, making the app performant.

[1] https://reactnative.dev/docs/the-new-architecture/pillars-fa... [2] https://reactnative.dev/docs/the-new-architecture/pillars-tu...

Thanks, I wasn't aware of them.

Lol, amazing to see history repeat itself over and over again

Indeed back in the dotcom wave, the startup I joined was making our own flavour of AOLServer.

Now in some projects, I am basically doing the same, with the difference that now I am using JavaScript instead of Tcl, and C++ instead of C for the native side.

At least now I have a JIT in the box.

> Ironically Android started out with JavaScript, and due to performance they pivoted into Java, if I remember correctly.

I consider myself very familiar with Android's early history and this would be news to me. Any sources? Love finding new tidbits.

what about the tens of thousands android apps?

There it is mostly an interop for doing JNI calls into the OS APIs, as people keep forgeting NDK is only for game developers and Java native methods.

android apps is more than an interop or JNI calls, it needs the "jvm" and lots of java libraries, docker-alike solution is the only thing I can think of that it could possibly work, but it's very heavy on cpu and memory resources when you have many apps to install. it seems to me infeasible to be Android apps compatible when Vega is used, nobody is going to rewrite all Android apps in RN.

Ah, I misunderstood your point, I took it from the point of view of how React Native is used in the context of writing Android applications.

As for Amazon, naturally if this goes forward they don't seem to care about keeping the Android ecosystem on their Fire tablets, as most likely doesn't bring them the business value they care about.

Note that FireOS doesn't run standard Android applications anyway.

> Note that FireOS doesn't run standard Android applications anyway

What do you mean by that?

I have a Fire Tab, and it has F-Droid and I've installed many apps from there with no extra steps.

I have a Fire Tab and it's collecting dust, I'm fairly certain Vega won't be able to do F-Droid, which is a bold move.

Because it doesn't run AOSP + Google special sauce on top.

I guess you were lucky in what APIs were being used, or the wrappers provided by Amazon.

You say this as if Android has tens of thousands of useful/good apps.

There’s probably 100-250 that you might _really_ want.

Amazon can easily afford to pay each developer $1 million to port theirs, if they get serious about their own OS.

That didn't seem to work for Microsoft.

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