Thought exercise: Would Amazon be / have been better off maintaining their own not-quite-compatible version of Android? Or would they have been better off cloni

Thought exercise: Would Amazon be / have been better off maintaining their own not-quite-compatible version of Android? Or would they have been better off cloning and commoditizing Apple’s development ecosystem? Higher up-front cost than a cheap fork of Android, for sure... But how much? Especially if they could manage to make a native development ecosystem that was plausibly competitive to Apple’s, but allowing for easily targeting Apple’s devices as well, I could see this strategy being a better way to stave off competition from third and fourth players. There’s prior art on cloning Apple / NeXT APIs and whatnot. Surely a company with the heaft of Amazon could do at least as well as the small open source efforts.