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Comment by wnevets | Hacker News Reader

>. The problem isn't the OS itself, it is the Play Store hegemony and the fact you cannot reasonably ship an Android phone without it - nobody would buy it.

isn't this what amazon does?

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While the Fire Phone may not have done well, all the Amazon Fire products are Android based. This includes the Fire Phone, Fire Tablets, and Fire TV.

> all the Amazon Fire products are Android based

They are based on AOSP, but Amazon is expressly forbidden from using the Android name, and it can't use the Play store, so it's not really in the Android (TM) market.

>but Amazon is expressly forbidden from using the Android name

source?

While the documentation itself is available to you under the Apache 2.0 license, note that proprietary trademarks and brand features are not included in that license. Google's trademarks and other brand features (including the Android stylized typeface logo) are not included in the license. https://source.android.com/license.html

Android is a proprietary trademark wholly owned by Google.

See also: Leverage over manufacturers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_%28operating_system%29...

maybe I'm dumb but I'm missing the part where Android is a proprietary trademark.

The term Android is not trademarked. Even the bugdroid is released under a cc-attrib license. Funnily, the term 'droid' is trademarked and licensed by lucasfilm/disney mostly.

I remember that being a thing when the droid phone was first launched.

> The term Android is not trademarked.

Google quote: "Android™ should have a trademark symbol the first time it appears in a creative."

Brand Guidelines http://developer.android.com/distribute/tools/promote/brand....

Yes, I do know who you are -- in fact, we have met -- but Google should not be using Android™ if it's not trademarked ;-)

I agree, obviously. Lemme look into it.

Oh, derp, I was thinking of something else. That makes a lot more sense (that We'd trademark)

;-) No probs. Thanks for checking.

And as a result they have terrible sales: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/26/amazon-fi...

Is that really because of the amazon store?

>There were many interesting anomalies in the launch of the Fire Phone. The $200 price tag for a 32GB version on an AT&T contract – the same price range as the iPhone 5S or Samsung GS5

Their tables are doing much better.

http://www.geekwire.com/2016/50-fire-tablet-vaults-amazon-in...

Their tablets are primarily sold as e-Readers. The app store isn't a primary need, and they don't really directly compete with Android tablets, even though they're similar.

Amazon's android fork is desperately bad irrespective of their app store. If you aren't primarily using the device to consume Amazon content it is essentially useless

Xiaomi is a better example. They're doing surprisingly well -- wikipedia says 70.8m units sold in China, and they run their own app store. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiaomi

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