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Ask HN: Why doesn't Microsoft build its own Android “fork”?

• deleted 9y ago
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• pwg 9y ago
  > What am I missing? You answered your own question here: > after all Android is open source.
  • koolba 9y ago
    That didn’t stop Amazon though it’s arguable that they have more to offer a consumer from a walled garden approach (Prime Video, Music, Kindle books...).
• ljquintanilla 9y ago
  They tried by investing heavily in Cyanogen mod but that didn't go anywhere.
  • frik 9y ago
    Well their investment basically killed Cyanogen inc and Cyanogen mod. Good that it's open source, so they forked it, and is now known as LineageOS.
• ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  The issue is that while Android itself is "technically" open source, it's a walled garden platform. Microsoft's own apps won't work without proprietary Google software. (Both Skype and Outlook won't launch without Google Location Services enabled, I haven't tried the launcher or the new Edge.) They can't include Google's proprietary software in their fork, since part of the agreement for distributing that software includes a clause where you agree not to fork Android. Even if Microsoft created their own location service for Android, changed their own apps, and made their own app store, they'd have to convince other app developers to support it, since Google has spent the last few years convincing everyone to build their apps on proprietary libraries and services. Essentially, they end up in the same boat as Windows Phone: Having a platform without apps, and not a strong incentive for developers to modify their apps to support it.
• murkle 9y ago
  Google Play Store isn't open, control of that is key. It doesn't matter if the platform it's running on is "Microsoft Android" or something else - Google still controls the store
  • fenwick67 9y ago
    Yes, but apps don't HAVE to use the Play store. Amazon, for example, has all its apps in a separate store because it doesn't like to play Google's games (the Amazon shopping app is not in the Play store because they don't want Google getting a slice of their profits). A similar strategy could theoretically work for MS.
    • nunez 9y ago
      Bringing up your own play Store is devilishly hard due to first mover advantage. Every other App Store pales in comparison to Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store.
    • yoz-y 9y ago
      Amazon does have its own store because it wants the app profits for themselves, however they do have shopping, kindle, prime and so on apps in the Play Store[1]. I suppose that Play Store has the same rules as the Apple App store. That is, you can have your own checkout and payment system as long as you sell things that are not for content that you consume in the application. This is why Uber and Amazon and other shopping apps do not have to share the profits, but for example Audible does not sell books through their iOS app and microsoft actually pays 30% to apple (now probably 15) for any Office subscription people get when getting it from the app. [1]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.amazon.mShop.android.shopping https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.amazon.mSh...
      • chokolad 9y ago
        You can't buy books via Kindle app on iPhone. You have to manually open Safari, go to amazon site and buy a book there. I believe it's exactly because Amazon does not want to give Apple the cut of the book profit.
• cjsuk 9y ago
  They'd fuck that up too.
• hacker_9 9y ago
  Alternatively why not build a transpiler for android apps? Java -> C# would be quite doable, and then just style the APIs and UI layouts similiar but too similar to end up in court. Then what dev wouldn't have a go if the process could be 90% automated? Instead they stayed in their own bubble of custom tech that didn't bring anything particularly revolutionary to the table, and failed to attract attention as a result.
  • enos 9y ago
    Microsoft was on the other side of such a scheme when OS/2 got the ability to run Windows apps. That's when you stopped getting native OS/2 apps, because why write one when the Windows one works on both?
  • Skunkleton 9y ago
    Android apps aren't strictly java, and they don't depend on open frameworks. Rather, they are built in a combination of languages and depend largely on googles proprietary frameworks.
    • hacker_9 9y ago
      Sure but the other languages such as C++ could be directly supported. The APIS could be copied and renamed. Not hard to duplicate the functionality without seeing the internals, just time consuming.
• tjoff 9y ago
  I've read (rumor alert) that this is kind of what they originally had in mind with the WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux). This would allow windows phones to run android apps from within Windows (though several obstacles remains, since the play store and other google services are proprietary) Rumored this worked so well that Microsoft canned it in favor of UWP, because if windows could run android apps there would basically not be any need for UWP. As a result Microsoft changed focus and gave us WSL on the desktop instead. The above could very well / likely be made up but I like that explanation.
  • WorldMaker 9y ago
    There are arguments that Android compatibility killed Blackberry, and those were brought up at the time. There is also the thing that Android apps without Google Play Services often feel like zombies of themselves. The easiest way to see that is comparing Amazon's FireOS to Android: which apps aren't even available, which ones are, but fail in strange ways, etc.
• edoceo 9y ago
  And why didn't RIM!? I'd love to have a phone with a hard keyboard like the old crackberry. That device was awesome.
  • nunez 9y ago
    They run full Android with RIM security extensions. See the DTEK line. They’ve outsourced device manufacturing to TCL but are still in the mobile business.
  • shyn3 9y ago
    The KeyOne?
• nunez 9y ago
  If I recall correctly, Microsoft did intend on having Windows Phone 10 run Android applications (they leaked it early even) but then pulled it back last minute.
• nunez 9y ago
  Because the OS doesn’t matter nearly as much as the apps running on that OS, and Google only allows licensed OEMs to preload Google apps onto their devices (for a fee). Also, how strange would it be for Microsoft to pay Google billions of dollars for them to use their App Store? That would not only be them conceding that they couldn’t win on mobile, but that would also reduce them to yet another Android Phone manufacturer that has to spend tens of millions of dollars on low margin devices that won’t sell. Also, Windows Phone was an amazing OS in its own right but failed largely because they couldn’t solve apps. It is impossibly hard to compete against Apple or Samsung in this space, especially when the OEMs didn’t want to play ball. (Samsung, HTC and LG made a few Windows phones that they didn’t invest a lot of time on. They were most likely an expensive relationship maintenance activity to retain a partnership with MS. I believe this happened because MS imposed really strict guidelines for their OS experience right out the gate that didn’t really benefit anyone but Microsoft (OEMs make money on preinstalled apps, for example; that wasn’t allowed.) It was much easier for them to just pump more money on making great Android devices than trying to make Windows Phone great again)
  • OJFord 9y ago
    I think I agree with you anyway, but if Amazon was MS and FireOS was the only platform with Office, especially Outlook, it would tilt the balance a bit.
    • exelius 9y ago
      People would just stop using Office then. Google has seriously eroded Microsoft’s dominance here — I’ve worked at a few major companies who have switched and Google is a far more cloud-native solution. It’s honestly more intuitive to the workers that we’re hiring. Microsoft’s Office leverage is gone. If they try to use it as a hammer in defense of their platform, their market share will drop. Their only option now is to try to increase the platform buy-in again.
      • CamelCaseName 9y ago
        How powerful and easy to pick up is Google App Script compared to VBA? Given your experience, do you see GAS overtaking VBA, and if so, in which fields? (Finance?) What industries were the companies you helped switch over working in? I ask because I'm while I'm roughly intermediate with VBA, I'm not sure if I should continue pursuing VBA or invest in something that might be more valuable in the future.
• blackoil 9y ago
  MS is experimenting with deals to have apps pre-installed on Android phones. e.g. An HTC/Lenovo phone with MS Launcher, Edge, OneDrive, Office, Cortana, Bing will be enough of a Microsoft phone. They don't need to go and fork the OS.
• eight_ender 9y ago
  Microsoft would have to provide a compelling reason to use their own app store and other services that would replace the Google ones. That's not to say it's impossible. Microsoft has been doing a lot of mobile development lately, and if you were trying to build a case for losing the Google Play store Office, Skype, and other business apps are a good place to start. The pessimistic part of me thinks that BYOD is so prevalent these day that a pure "business phone" locked into the Microsoft ecosystem just wouldn't work. Maybe five years ago it would have appealed to enterprises wanting to roll out a fleet of employee devices but now a phone needs to be as appealing to the consumer as the business.
• grizzles 9y ago
  They did and canned it. It was called Astoria and from what I heard it worked really well. The media said the opposite but "Too well" was what one MS guy said to me. They had a ton of people working on the project.
  • slipstream- 9y ago
    I also heard "too well", as in, developers just wanted to use their android apps instead of making windows apps. It wasn't totally canned though, it became the Windows Subsystem for Linux.
    • lostmsu 9y ago
      If that is, indeed, the case, then Microsoft makes a bad image of itself by not giving this to their existing users, who desire that a lot.
    • RaleyField 9y ago
      Jokes on them then. I'd 100% be on WP and not on Android if that was the case.
• ben1040 9y ago
  They don't get instant access, though. As a developer I already have to support both Google's flavor of Android and Amazon's flavor of Android, with their own separate implementations of IAP, push notifications, etc. I'd have to support MSFT's implementations too and you'd have to convince me (and the people who pay me) that it's worth bothering to do.
• neolefty 9y ago
  Are the days of Microsoft attacking all comers over? Or even trying to carve out their own niche in mobile? They seem much more interested in playing nice with the new platforms -- free Office on Android & iOS, for example, and good integration between phones and Windows on the desktop. Of course, they've also sold Office on Mac forever.
• j_s 9y ago
  Related / triggered by: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15432720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15432720 (4 hours earlier, 361+ comments) In case either one gets separated from the other as the front page drifts by.
• pmurT 9y ago
  MS already makes royalty on every significant Android device made
• codeScientist 9y ago
  MS doesn't need any Android fork. All they need is a Launcher for Andorid and drive ppl towards their services via that. As it happens, they already have one and seems to work quite well. I like it much better than Google Launcher. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.microsoft.launcher&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.microsoft....
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