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Comment by dhoulb | Hacker News Reader

Is the last part about licensing true (or sourced from somewhere)? Surely Amazon could just drop the Cast library into their iPhone and Android apps and they’d be all set? I can’t see Google stopping them (well maybe they would now it’s escalated, but they wouldn’t have last year.)

I assumed not supporting Cast was just an excuse not to stock Chromecasts etc on Amazon.

BTW I totally agree with the frustration of the Cast protocol not being more open, a tonne of cool standalone ‘browser on TV’ usecases like screensharing/dashboards/multiscreen aren’t possible on Chromecast (and it sucks). I assume they’re under a load of pressure from MPAA type groups to keep it locked down. (As though the TV is some holy box that must be protected.)

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> Surely Amazon could just drop the Cast library into their iPhone and Android apps and they’d be all set?

The cast library doesn’t contain any of the code required to cast – all that code is in the Google Play Services in the system app, not in the library.

And you can obviously understand how Amazon can’t just reuse that.

They could certainly do it in their Android and iOS apps. They can't on their Kindle apps, since Kindle is AOSP-based but not Android.

Android is an OS – specifically, the AOSP projects result, the Google Play services are only available in the Google Play distribution of Android.

So Amazon can’t do it in their Android apps, unless they create a special version for Google Play Android.

But Amazon – like many other developers, including myself – refuses to create different versions for different Android distributions.

Other Android distributions that are also excluded include MIUI, Replicant, LineageOS, CopperheadOS, and Androidx86.

> Android is an OS – specifically, the AOSP projects result,

No, Android is a trademark which designates the branded, proprietary-but-open-core OS developed by Google and licensed to handset and other device makers.

AOSP is an open source codebase which forms part of the codebase of Android.

> So Amazon can’t do it in their Android apps, unless they create a special version for Google Play Android

There is no such thing; that's just Android. Pop

> Other Android distributions that are also excluded include MIUI, Replicant, LineageOS, CopperheadOS, and Androidx86.

No, those are other AOSP-derived OSs, which can run some subset of Android apps.

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