Amazon 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.
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.
It'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.
Let'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.
> 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.
I 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.
The 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.)
We 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.
The robbers work for the same fence, who sells to the same snake oil salesmen.
The fence is adtech. The robbers are anyone taking your device/behavior data to sell to third parties aka adtech and data brokers, "de-identified" or not.
The more robbers get a toehold inside your house, the more snake oil you're subjected to.
It'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.
Even 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.
Are you living years in the past? Apple is literally preparing side loading and third party stores support right now because of the EU Digital Markets Act.
This 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.
If 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?
React 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.
>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.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] threadThe 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-...
This would prevent Amazon from shipping those but they wouldn't be refused by factories.
This is more likely about control/NIH.
I mean, it's almost literally what MS was doing with windows back in the 90s, isn't it?
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.
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.
"Hey, y'all can have our source code, but no one big try to copy our business plan with it"
(And I say this as a grudging Android user. Better than the Apple nanny state... sorta.)
The fence is adtech. The robbers are anyone taking your device/behavior data to sell to third parties aka adtech and data brokers, "de-identified" or not.
The more robbers get a toehold inside your house, the more snake oil you're subjected to.
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.
> when apple has shown you can lock down a 30% tax on all app installs and draw no attention for some reason.
Have you looked at the Nintendo store?
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.
>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.
Of course Amazon adds it's own adware in FireOS so moving to another OS won't improve this.
I was really excited. Until reading this.
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
And it begat JSON, which is nice.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38216096
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38223149
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.