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Whats your plan on competing with China copycats, who are no doubt already working on a lower cost clone of your product? Since its such a great idea, but uses

Whats your plan on competing with China copycats, who are no doubt already working on a lower cost clone of your product? Since its such a great idea, but uses mostly off the shelf parts and doesn't require much specialization, its a perfect target for them. Look at the patterns: They quickly cannibalize and eventually completely commoditize the market for easy-to-copy products by flooding ebay, amazon, aliexpress, etc with comparable but cheaper items, some of which are probably going to be made by your own supplier/factory in China. Eventually the best of these these get on Engadget or Gizmodo and that's it. Examples: Android tablets, Google Cardboard, Android Phones, Phone Batteries, etc. Certainly many will have inferior packaging and engrish manuals. But some will be good enough or better than your product... I would be terrified to base a business around this type of item.

adultSwim 10y ago
Great question. The copycats will be agile (quick to market, quick to iterate through changes) but I imagine their software side would be lacking. Should Andromium be more afraid of Samsung/HTC/etc? Xiaomi? (in between a generic copycat and a Samsung) With so much data being pushed off devices and onto 3rd parties, I wonder if the real competition is Apple and Google?
- ethanpil 10y ago
  But they don't need software. You are doing that work for them by giving away your core platform for free. I would imagine that if you change that now your userbase would likely rebel and/or clone/fork your software. Do you plan on hardware locking Andromium?
  - ajiang 10y ago
    Hardware locking is an option, but to be perfectly honest, we can be a lot more creative than that: - Freemium tier pricing - Software licensing for enterprise (security features) - 'Preloading' apps - Direct app integration into desktop features Given how critical the software experience is (and by the way how difficult building an OS experience inside of another OS is), I wouldn't be too quick to assume people jump to whatever is free.
- ajiang 10y ago
  Much more afraid of Google here. Or correction - much more afraid of us delivering such a bad experience software wise that no one will use it, meaning no developers will care to build software for it, meaning no one will care. And after that we're much more afraid of Google.
ajiang 10y ago
Oh man, passed out (it's like 5 AM here in Shanghai). Great question. The hardware for the Superbook isn't hard, to be perfectly honest. We actually fully expect that we'll have copy cats, and there is absolutely nothing we can do about that. We are at heart a software company, and if you look at the various attempts at doing this, getting the software experience right has been the challenging part. One of the reasons why we price the item low is so that we can get it out to as many individuals as possible. By building up a large user base, we can build the only thing that's defensible here - a great software experience with a sophisticated developer network, building software for the Andromium experience. In fact, we'd actually be pretty happy if someone else built and sold the hardware - and really just got it out there. We can build a big enough business on the software side, owning the home screen for the desktop environment.
- ajiang 10y ago
  Btw, if you're reading this and you are an Android dev interested in working on a really challenging technical problem (and not 'just an app'), reach out - we're looking to hire employees #1-3.

adultSwim 10y ago

Great question. The copycats will be agile (quick to market, quick to iterate through changes) but I imagine their software side would be lacking. Should Andromium be more afraid of Samsung/HTC/etc? Xiaomi? (in between a generic copycat and a Samsung) With so much data being pushed off devices and onto 3rd parties, I wonder if the real competition is Apple and Google?

ethanpil 10y ago
But they don't need software. You are doing that work for them by giving away your core platform for free. I would imagine that if you change that now your userbase would likely rebel and/or clone/fork your software. Do you plan on hardware locking Andromium?
- ajiang 10y ago
  Hardware locking is an option, but to be perfectly honest, we can be a lot more creative than that: - Freemium tier pricing - Software licensing for enterprise (security features) - 'Preloading' apps - Direct app integration into desktop features Given how critical the software experience is (and by the way how difficult building an OS experience inside of another OS is), I wouldn't be too quick to assume people jump to whatever is free.
ajiang 10y ago
Much more afraid of Google here. Or correction - much more afraid of us delivering such a bad experience software wise that no one will use it, meaning no developers will care to build software for it, meaning no one will care. And after that we're much more afraid of Google.

ajiang 10y ago

Oh man, passed out (it's like 5 AM here in Shanghai). Great question. The hardware for the Superbook isn't hard, to be perfectly honest. We actually fully expect that we'll have copy cats, and there is absolutely nothing we can do about that. We are at heart a software company, and if you look at the various attempts at doing this, getting the software experience right has been the challenging part. One of the reasons why we price the item low is so that we can get it out to as many individuals as possible. By building up a large user base, we can build the only thing that's defensible here - a great software experience with a sophisticated developer network, building software for the Andromium experience. In fact, we'd actually be pretty happy if someone else built and sold the hardware - and really just got it out there. We can build a big enough business on the software side, owning the home screen for the desktop environment.

ajiang 10y ago
Btw, if you're reading this and you are an Android dev interested in working on a really challenging technical problem (and not 'just an app'), reach out - we're looking to hire employees #1-3.