5 ms·
Amazon Making Its Own Linux-Based OS to Replace Android
- gundmc 3y agoWhat are the advantages of doing this rather than just using or forking AOSP?
- bestouff 3y agoThey control the OS so people won't sideload other apps or, god forbid, port LineageOS on "their" devices.
- arrakeenrevived 3y agoArstechnica [0] has a better article on it. The tl;dr is that Amazon already uses a fork of Android called FireOS. However, Google makes manufacturers sign a contract that says that if they manufacture devices that run Android, they cannot manufacture other devices that use forks of Android. This was making it difficult for Amazon to find manufacturers that could make device with FireOS, so Amazon is ditching Android entirely. 0: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/amazon-fire-tablets-and-other-gear-will-reportedly-switch-away-from-android/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/amazon-fire-tablets-...
- deovferreira 3y agoIt's not the manufacturers (as in, the factory that makes the device). This has to do with inclusion of play services (I.e. An OEM like Amazon cannot ship incompatible Android forks if it wants in on the GMS/play services/play store ecosystem). This would prevent Amazon from shipping those but they wouldn't be refused by factories. This is more likely about control/NIH.
- riffraff 3y agoThis seems like something the antitrust should look into either way. I mean, it's almost literally what MS was doing with windows back in the 90s, isn't it?
- deovferreira 3y agoI don't disagree.
- ApolloFortyNine 3y agoMeanwhile at Apple, with the only way to install apps being through their 30% cut app store.
- realusername 3y agoBoth should be legally hammered, we don't need to pick any option
- wkat4242 3y agoWhich is what's happening in the EU now, Apple will be forced to open up sideloading.
- mdasen 3y agoLet's say Amazon creates their own OS. Google then makes manufacturers sign a contract that says if they manufacture devices that run Android (with access to Google Play services), they can't manufacture devices that use forks of Android or Amazon's from-scratch OS. If it's an anti-trust violation, then it's an anti-trust violation whether it's a fork of Android or not. If it isn't an anti-trust violation, then Google can ban things that aren't forks of Android too. If it's legal for Google to force manufacturers not to use Android-based FireOS, then they could also force manufacturers not to use Vega-based FireOS. It feels like Amazon needs to challenge the legitimacy of those Google contracts or else they may find themselves in another situation where Google just amends their manufacturer contract to disallow Android forks and Vega-based FireOS.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago> If it's an anti-trust violation, then it's an anti-trust violation whether it's a fork of Android or not. If it isn't an anti-trust violation, then Google can ban things that aren't forks of Android too. Actually, the law often turns more on the intent of the person being investigated than on what they do. (Is this a good idea? No.) Google can claim a more convincing fig leaf when they're regulating Android than they can when they're just saying "also, you can't work with Amazon". And that slight difference in plausibility can make a big difference in whether the same contractual clause is legal or illegal.
- unethical_ban 3y agoHa, seems like a way for Google to prevent Amazon from pulling the Hardware equivalent of Elasticsearch forking --> Opensearch. "Hey, y'all can have our source code, but no one big try to copy our business plan with it"
- thriftwy 3y agoI remember they were supposed to go that route with their Kindle Fire(?) a decade ago, but I'm not sure what was the result. I'm pretty sure I've not seen "get from Amazon store" buttons anywhere, so I'd assume it flooped.
- smith7018 3y agoWow, what an obvious way to burn cash!
- PartiallyTyped 3y agoIt's not like AWS doesn't have experience institutional experience with Linux.
- PartiallyTyped 3y agoOops, saw my typo. Sorry it was late.
- steve1977 3y agoLooking at the mess that is Amazon Linux 2023, I wouldn’t give that too much weight.
- PartiallyTyped 3y agoAmazon Linux is just one platform that is directly customer facing. Linux is used indirectly in lots of parts and the teams submit lots of patches to upstream.
- jeppesen-io 3y agoWhat mess? Moved most of our workloads to it. been quite pleased
- cdmckay 3y agoCurious what makes it a mess?
- pjmlp 3y agoWe just need Linux kernel + whatever is needed for containers, what mess?
- woleium 3y agoThis will be Lab126, not AWS
- bhhaskin 3y agoAh yes, so instead of Google ads you get Amazon ads.
- cute_boi 3y agoI think it is better. At least they compete with each other.
- nilespotter 3y agoI do not anticipate this will be a race to see who can produce the best OS for the consumer, or the most privacy conscious OS either.
- soraminazuki 3y agoCompetition isn't always a good thing. For example, would you want multiple robbers competing to break into your home? I'd rather have zero.
- xcdzvyn 3y agoOperating systems are valuable. Theft is not.
- kelnos 3y agoThe value of an operating system that exists in no small part to siphon off your personal information so someone can put advertisements in front of your face... well, not sure I value that at all. (And I say this as a grudging Android user. Better than the Apple nanny state... sorta.)
- pmontra 3y agoWe do have multiple robbers competing to break into our homes. We keep them out with locks and police but first of all we don't let them in and sit on our couch with us. I do have an Android phone and tablet. I use as little Google services as possible and never logged in, unless I have to as in the case of the Play Store to keep apps updated. But I don't buy anything from them and I install more and more from F-Droid.
- kgbcia 3y agoLooking forward to more competition.
- jauntywundrkind 3y agoIt's so so hard to imagine Amazon actually building any useful or interesting ecosystem. They won't open source these works. They probably won't talk about them. Another black knight contender in the tech world. There'll end up having to be some kind of sdk, some outreach to devs, but most of this is going to be a huge black box that no one can read anything about. A dark OS. Maybe just the modern Nintendo strategy of having no third party software is enough, works out. Maybe the big mainstreams apps will all sign up.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago> Maybe just the modern Nintendo strategy of having no third party software is enough Have you looked at the Nintendo store?
- woleium 3y agoI imagine it’ll be _nearly_ android app compatible, so no need for sdk
- pkulak 3y agoWhy not entirely compatible? Can’t have the Google bits though, which makes most stuff not work anyway, I guess.
- psnehanshu 3y agoYou mean just like iOS?
- ApolloFortyNine 3y agoEven in this thread people are asking about Google's handling of android requiring anti trust intervention. No shot a company would open source their os in the future, when apple has shown you can lock down a 30% tax on all app installs and draw no attention for some reason.
- masklinn 3y ago
- shmerl 3y agoSomething Wayland based would be interesting.
- _8j50 3y agoThis is welcome news. If it is not clunky/ugly/inconsistent like android it can be a good IOS alternative. Even better if they put up a walled garden and maintain quality app store but it would probably be similar to the "prime" experience, worse than what google is doing already. But there is a silver lining: Amazon is a million times more human/user/customer friendly than Google. No more random account cancellations and human friendly UI.
- charcircuit 3y agoThis sounds like NIH. >Vega is primed for lower-power devices that struggle with the bloat that Android, ostensibly a mobile phone OS, comes with, What bloat? Android already is designed for low power devices.
- Zetobal 3y agoIf you remove the bloat you aren't shipping because of the exact same problem amazon was facing so they started to develop their Linux based OS. Did you read either the article or the comments?
- charcircuit 3y agoThe article was saying that FireOS, Amazon's fork of AOSP, was bloated.
- wkat4242 3y agoAll the adware. Clean Android (aosp) is much more efficient because it works only for the user instead of spending most of its cycles spying on them. Of course Amazon adds it's own adware in FireOS so moving to another OS won't improve this.
- stakhanov 3y ago> App developers are being told to use React Native as an application framework I was really excited. Until reading this.
- psnehanshu 3y agoWhy is that?
- voidr 3y agoReact Native is very unreliable and unproductive, you write your code in JavaScript, that then gets executed in a VM, that then calls some glue code that may or may not work reliably, when these don't work: good luck debugging it. React itself became quite a mess as well nowadays, it's becoming bigger and more bloated with each release. You can now very easily re-create the AngularJS hell in React. JavaScript doesn't scale in productivity and in terms of performance, TypeScript solves the productivity problem, but you still suffer a lot due to JavaScript's poor runtime performance characteristics.
- stakhanov 3y agoI hate JavaScript with a passion and wish there were better/more options for writing UIs these days, without getting sucked into it.
- realusername 3y agoPersonally, I like flutter a lot, its web story is subpar in my opinion but that's one of the only downsides for me. If you only need native platforms and/or just want to use the web target as an app demo, it's a good option, it feels very solid and productive
- huytersd 3y agoJavaScript is disgusting
- smitty1e 3y ago
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38216096 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38216096 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38223149 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38223149
- ta8903 3y ago>Amazon’s new operating system is also based on a flavor of Linux Cool. If it's not completely locked down like android and lets you access the console and has a real graphics toolkit, I could see it being being more useful than android.