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Comment by larubbio | Hacker News Reader

This move really saddens me. When I left Netscape to work at Amazon one of the things that I was excited about was a quote from Jeff. "Focus on the customer, not competition." It seems they hve forgotten that.

I found it frustrating when I couldn't stream Prime videos to my android phone (is stock android that different from the version on Fire?)

I found it frustrating (but understandable) when they said they wouldn't support Google TV anymore. (Although the 'support' was letting me watch videos in Chrome).

Now this? It seems like they have forgotten completely about the customer and are focusing solely on the competition.

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Prime instant video always worked on Android. Amazon just didn't want you to use it because they wanted to sell you a tablet. Or a horribly overpriced clunky phone.

Amazon now lets you use Prime instant video on your Android device, but there's a big catch. You have to manually install it from their site and allow untrusted apps on your phone to do so. And it's not just Prime instant video you're installing, you're installing the full Amazon App Store on your Android device and giving it full permissions to everything on your phone so it can install and update other apps.

This type of behavior is only focused on the competition and a big middle finger to the customer.

And while you can get it running, it doesn't support Chromecast because they want you to buy their own competing product. I can feel the Justice Department's Antitrust Division rumbling from here.

Similarly, the normal buying experience is being compromised by the pushing of Amazon Prime. When you simply buy a product and want it sent to you, you really have to hunt out the small, unbolded text which allows you to do that without paying any subscription, as against a display of advert and button covering about 2/3rds of the screen to sign up to Prime.

I have had an elderly neighbour ask for help after mistakenly signing up for the service, and personally, the experience reminds me of hunting out the real download button on free download websites, in amongst the flash adverts. I've always thought the big advantage of Amazon was its ease of use for casual purchasers, and I can't imagine that level of hassle and uncertainty is appreciated.

Amazon Prime Video works on my Android TV (it's basically the Nexus player built in to the TV). Which one were you talking about? What is Google TV?

A precursor to Android TV: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_TV

> I found it frustrating when I couldn't stream Prime videos to my android phone (is stock android that different from the version on Fire?)

They've fixed that now. There was a time when you couldn't, but eventually the fire crashed badly enough that they started allowing it.

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