Hacker News Reader

Comment by specialp | Hacker News Reader

Honestly this is no surprise. I am a big Amazon fan, but if you are selling a restricted platform item you have to sell it at a loss. I do not know what they were thinking. It was priced higher than comparable flagship phones while being somewhat locked down.

View on HN

Yep. Lack of Google Apps was a complete deal killer for me, even withstanding the price. I felt the same way when I tested out a Kindle Fire tablet (opted for a Nexus 7). You'd have to pry my Kindle reader out of my cold dead hands though.

Lack of Google Apps was a big problem 2 years ago. These days, lack of Play Services means a huge number of non-Google Android apps won't work. Play Services is Android for many developers.

I bought the Fire HD 8.9", rooted and installed Play store. You can run all the apps on play store. It was a better deal that way.

But nobody has payed Google for store access in this scenario. They may cut you off any time.

I think the relative failure of the Fire tablet should have been a sign to Amazon that they needed a new approach for the phone.

And specifically that the Fire tablet seems to be most successful among kids. The parental controls on Kindle Fire are pretty good, but the locked-down app store (No YouTube!) was only tolerable because the parent is choosing the apps.

Yup, least surprising failure of a big-co hardware product launch in quite some time.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7912878

FTA: "When it launched a few months ago, it was $199"

$199 with the essentially non-optional AT&T plan. $649 regular price, which they would let you buy it at even though the phone was locked to AT&T no matter how you bought it. Into a market where the Nexus 5 already existed at $350 (fully unlocked) and Motorola had even cheaper options for very functional full-Android phones.

Months later and I'm still kind of bemusedly surprised the Fire Phone launched at the price that it did because prior to launch I was nearly certain that a surprisingly low price relative to the hardware would be the killer feature, given Amazon's history and the fact that the phone was designed from the ground up to herd you into Amazon's content ecosystem (and I say that as a happy and high volume customer of Amazon Prime/Instant/Kindle).

  Months later and I'm still kind of bemusedly surprised the Fire Phone launched at the price that it did because prior to launch I was nearly certain that a surprisingly low price relative to the hardware would be the killer feature, given Amazon's history and the fact that the phone was designed from the ground up to herd you into Amazon's content ecosystem

100% agreed -- they've even said that their stated goal with the Kindle Fire was to bring quality tech at affordable prices; why they thought they could get away with a subprime phone at a prime price is beyond me.

Agreed. I had been impressed with Amazon's initial tries with the hardware space with kindle which really solved a customer need in an innovative way. In contrast the fire line of phones and tv seems to have really taken their eye off the ball. Customers don't want to pay a premium to buy another portal into purchasing things from Amazon.

That must be why the iPhone is such a spectacular failure.

I don't think it has anything to do with the restrictiveness, just that it was not very compelling and had 2 weird gimmicks no one really had a use for. That combined with the low visibility of Amazon as a phone manufacturer, I can really understand people held off buying.

This isn't 2007, though. They were competing against 3 established brands and offering a more restricted product with no differentiators.

Microsoft is having enough problems convincing people that a 3rd place app store is worth developing for, how was Amazon supposed to get in?

I think your rough list is... Apple Google Microsoft (in terms of how lucrative developing for a given platform seems).

I like how Blackberry is considered 'effectively dead'; I've felt the same way since they failed to react to the iPhone.

By making it very easy to port Android apps and having lower fees.

> That must be why the iPhone is such a spectacular failure.

The iPhone has a VERY LARGE ecosystem of software and hardware to support it. There is a lot of value there.

But the Fire Phone didn't have that. It ran a version of Android so they could have had a lot of stuff but instead they chose to prevent that. In the end it cost as much as their competitors but had no software and it's only unique features were somewhat gimmicky.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com