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Comment by fidotron | Hacker News Reader

It's not a poor idea at all. The main example used to be Amazon, but now it's China. China are going to be the source of a lot of Google headaches, thanks to their inability to operate there leading to a majority of Android devices shipped there not including their services at all, giving a critical mass to the market for applications without their components.

Hugo Barra ended up at a Chinese company (Xiaomi) and Google just invested in Lenovo, but unless there's a big policy change on the way the Android/China beast will get further and further out of control.

MS absolutely should weigh in with a privacy hardened Android with great Exchange and Active Directory support (and Nokia Maps). It would be huge, and it would force Apple and Google right on to the defensive.

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But it would have lousy app compatibility... so what advantage would it offer over Windows Phone?

It would have about as lousy app compat as the Kindle Fire, which is to say nothing like as much as Google would like you to believe.

I'll say it: the Amazon APIs are actually better than some of the Google equivalents too. MS can play exactly the same game, but with the muscle of small business users.

Windows Phone simply has negligible actual interest from the dev community because it's too much of a technical island, and tied to the whole Metro disaster.

It would have better app compatibility than Windows Phone.

I don't get why this censoring, which stop US businesses like Google, doesn't lead to a trade war? The Americans are usually not shy about those?

Edit: fidotron, to me it seemed China tried to get rid of Google (internal hacking attacks, etc). That level of aggression is normal for China?

Because it's self censorship on Google's part.

The killer problem, from a western dev perspective, is you can only distribute free apps on the Play Store in China since Google don't process payments there. Their ad systems also do not work. Apple do not have these problems, largely since their surface area around problematic services is so much smaller.

Google are in a bit of a spot here, especially post Snowden basically showing the western govs were no worse than the Chinese (at least at monitoring, though maybe not in consequences of those being monitored) when the aggressive surveillance by the Chinese was stated as the reason for their withdrawal. It still amazes me how naive Googlers seem to be about issues with surveillance and security in general in a political sense, not merely a technical one.

China isn't guilty only about surveillance, but also about censorship - which is the reason for Google's actions, that were probably made because of both moral and technical issues - since it is difficult to censor stuff at Google's scale.

And in so far as the western governments being no worse than the Chinese - what a bunch of crap.

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