Amazon Fire Tablets and other gear will reportedly switch away from Android | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Fire Tablets and other gear will reportedly switch away from Android

arstechnica.com

33 pointsrbanffy9 comments

Couldn’t fit enough ads in the android UX so they’re starting from scratch. /s

There isn’t a technical reason to do this other than pulling support from Google as they continually show how much Amazon truly sees them as a competitor.

It also shows a roadmap possibility, like Amazon eventually wanting control of their own hardware or chips (which is exactly what they are doing: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/aws/take-a-look-inside-the-...) to compete with Apple in custom silicon.

>other than pulling support from Google as they continually show how much Amazon truly sees them as a competitor.

It seems the opposite to me. The article talks about this. Google has contractual limitations on manufacturers that ship devices with Android that says they are not allowed to also manufacture devices with forked versions of Android. This was making it hard for Amazon to find any manufacturers that contractually even could make Fire devices (since FireOS is a fork). It seems like Google was the one pulling support from Amazon.

Seems like a Pyrrhic victory though? It sounds like Vega will be similar to ChromeOS, boot into a browser, more or less. That could work for consuming Amazon's own content like Video or Kindle, sure. And Netflix etc. should work, but no native apps may turn off some potential customers I would think.

The people who buy it to install custom apps are not the ones they want and would like to remove. Their core userbase doesn't care about it.

The original Kindles already have a custom Linux distribution anyway.

Most people buy these devices for Amazon services.

This reeks of attempting to close the garden further. Whatever happened to that boot/hack that gave cli to ipad that was mentioned a few years ago.

"Amdroid"

I wonder if apple will benefit from this?

It might spur some sales of entry-level iPads as a result of people finding that these Amazon tablets don’t run much useful software. It’s more likely that competing Android tablets at Fire pricepoints will take that marketshare though.

Maybe Apple should launch a line of even cheaper iPads that are meant to better compete with Fire-like devices. Even if the SoCs used in this line are a generation older than what’s in the current $329 iPad I’m sure they’d perform better than whatever Amazon is putting in Fires.

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