it's not illegal for Google to block Amazon's app store from Google play
It is weird though because a couple months ago I thought they had announced they had come to some agreement, and now it seems to be escalating again.
One more thing, when Amazon found out people were installing Google Play Services on their Fire Tablets they issued a software update to prevent that loophole.
Furthermore, from my understanding, for any device to support streaming to Chromecast, it must have Google Play Services, which in turns means complying with MADA. The leaked MADA documents that the public has seen requires you to distribute all of Google's apps in a prominent position on your device, prevents you from forking Android - even on other, completely unrelated devices (prohibiting what Amazon did with Fire OS), requires you to give Google detailed sales information about your devices each month, and more. (Read the article I linked above, and/or review one of the linked MADAs (2).)
So from what I've read about the MADA, supporting Chromecast streaming on Amazon devices would require a complete "takeover" of every Android-based device that Amazon sells, replacing FireOS with Google's Android, and forcing Amazon to bundle Google Play Services and all of Google's apps, and giving those apps the prominent position over Amazon's. The MADA would require this for all devices, even ones that wouldn't support Chromecast streaming.
In a Recode interview (1), Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos implied that these business terms are the heart of the issue:
> "We sell Roku, we sell Xbox, we sell Playstation. We're happy to sell competitive products on Amazon. When we sell those devices, we want our player — our Prime Video player — to be on the device, and we want it to be on the device with acceptable business terms. You can always get the player on the device. The question is, can you get it on there with acceptable business terms? And if you can't, then we don't want to sell it to our customers, because they're going to be buying it thinking they can watch Prime Video, and then they're going to be disappointed and return it."
(1) https://www.recode.net/2016/5/31/11826394/amazon-apple-tv-go... (circa 1h:15m in video)
(2) http://www.benedelman.org/docs/samsung-mada.pdf - see page labeled 6 of 14
If any of the twenty or so mandatory apps the MADA requires constitutes a monopoly, then they are bundling in violation of US antitrust laws.
Tying (informally, product tying) is the practice of selling one product or service as a mandatory addition to the purchase of a different product or service. In legal terms, a tying sale makes the sale of one good (the tying good) to the de facto customer (or de jure customer) conditional on the purchase of a second distinctive good (the tied good). Tying is often illegal when the products are not naturally related. It is related to but distinct from freebie marketing, a common (and legal) method of giving away (or selling at a substantial discount) one item to ensure a continual flow of sales of another related item.
Horizontal tying is the practice of requiring consumers to pay for an unrelated product or service together with the desired one.[1] A hypothetical example would be for Bic to sell its pens only with Bic lighters. (However, a company may offer a limited free item with another purchase as a promotion.
Vertical tying is the practice of requiring customers to purchase related products or services together, from the same company.[1] For example, a company might mandate that its automobiles could only be serviced by its own dealers. In an effort to curb this, many jurisdictions require that warranties not be voided by outside servicing; for example, see the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act in the United States.
The Wikipedia Tying entry[1] also makes references to both Apple and Microsoft products. Of particular interest was how Microsoft not only ties their own products, but also ties Android OEM's, who they shake down to license their patents, to bundle their Microsoft mobile applications.
>Microsoft has also tied its software to the third-party Android mobile operating system, by requiring manufacturers that license patents it claims covers the OS and smartphones to ship Microsoft Office Mobile and Skype applications on the devices.
There's no technical reason Chromecasts can't be set up by Kindle Fire devices, it's an intentionally-implemented block by Google.
As far as contributing back to the AOSP, that's another area where Google's iron grip on Android shows. You can report bugs and help to patch things, but there's no actual way to contribute anything meaningful to the roadmap.
This is some high-level misinformation being spread on your part, and not the first time you've done this on HN.
Chromecast is an open SDK - Amazon has the power to implement it at any time: https://developers.google.com/cast/docs/terms
The Chromecast SDK allows Amazon to receive Chromecast streams on the Fire TV? Since when?
Cause from what I see here, half of the SDK’s terms ban casting without the SDK, and the SDK itself doesn’t work on devices without Play Services such as the Kindle devices, nor does it work to receive streams.
You’re spreading bullshit again, as every (x|g)oogler has in the other Chromecast thread.
Give me an open source library or full protocol documents I can use to send and receive chromecast streams, so I can stream to my raspberry pi and send streams from a non-Google device, and your argument will have merit.
Your employer's site seems to indicate not: https://www.google.com/chromecast/setup/
Again, Amazon has the power to add Chromecast support to the Fire OS. They chose not to, just as they chose to remove chromecast support from Twitch when they acquired it.
https://www.techhive.com/article/2988560/streaming-hardware/...
It wasn't quite that. Amazon got pissy about Google following Apple's lead in taking a cut of digital in-app purchases. It's an insane policy, but it is an Apple policy that the industry adopted.
It is not Amazon’s fault that the Android Compatibility Test Suite requires the availability of proprietary Google code, and that the AOSP itself does not pass the CTS.
It’s Google’s fault that Android’s open source version isn’t even considered Android anymore, nor does it have even a working email app anymore. It’s Google’s fault that over the last few years, the AOSP search app, music app, calendar app, contacts app, and finally even the phone app were all dropped and lost support.
The CTS is used to guarantee all Android apps on Google Play work on the device. That's on Amazon for not really caring to maintain compatibility and instead use their own services as a replacement. As for the AOSP not passing the CTS, it was never intended to do so.
>It’s Google’s fault that Android’s open source version isn’t even considered Android anymore, nor does it have even a working email app anymore.
According to the following link updates were made to the Email app 2 days ago which seems to indicate it's still maintained.
https://android.googlesource.com/platform/packages/apps/Emai...
>It’s Google’s fault that over the last few years, the AOSP search app, music app, calendar app, contacts app, and finally even the phone app were all dropped and lost support.
These apps require Google services to even work and it's unrealistic to think Google is going to provide non OHA members free access to their servers.
Back on 2.3.7, all apps did work on AOSP. The same on 4.0. Only after 4.0 did critical functionality get moved to the Play Services. This was, as the EU antitrust investigation that's still underway, has already found, anticompetitive.
> According to the following link updates were made to the Email app 2 days ago which seems to indicate it's still maintained.
The app shows a single screen, "Please switch to GMail".
> These apps require Google services to even work and it's unrealistic to think Google is going to provide non OHA members free access to their servers.
All these apps were entirely open source — including Google Search, Google Talk and Google Books — during Android 2.3.7
4.0 dropped Talk, Books, Search, Music.
Between 4.0 and 5.0, Calendar, Contacts, and the Phone app were dropped, and even parts of the launcher.
When I bought all but my latest Nexus device, half of the APIs that are now closed source used to be open. This is fraud, advertising on the box a "fully open source" system, and then closing it off.
Google is absolutely at fault here, and I consider this closing off of AOSP a direct attack.
Android is what you get when you compile from AOSP, if your app doesn't run there, it's broken. Amazon has done massive amounts of work to get as much of the CTS passing as possible (and actually, with their own services they did manage to pass the automated part of the CTS once), but after that, Google introduced new cryptographic signatures on their APIs to prevent this. Amazon (and microG) both solved that by live-patching out the signature checks. As result, Google introduced SafetyNet, a DRM system which verifies the integrity of the system (including bootloader, efuses, and trustzone parts), and reports this to a Google server, which then reports the signature to the servee of the app dev.
Amazon has done everything possible to keep their services compatible, even building compatibility layers for all (!) Google Play APIs.
Google on the other hand has introduced new DRM and obfuscation features with every version.
I'm not sure how the fuck I'm supposed to see Google as the good actor here, considering they're continuously trying to prevent any competition in this space, and are hurting the open source community.
And that's without ever considering Amazon's store. When I published an app in Amazon's store, they got a human to test it for me on all Kindle devices, on hardware. I talked to the human, gave demo access, etc. I got live feedback. When I complained about a missing API, they had it fixed within of a few weeks.
Google on the other hand doesn't offer any support, API complaints get ignored, and to this day on the Nexus 7 "ab".split("") returns something different than on the Nexus 5 — ["", "a","b"] vs ["a", "b"]. On some other Nexus devices even ["a", "b", ""]. Plus Socket.setKeepAlive is broken on Chromebooks. SocketChannel.read and SocketChannel.close both take a lock on the same object, SocketChannel.read can block forever and Thread.interrupt calls SocketChannel.close. Deadlock. Plus thousands more of such bugs which I had to work around, and requested fixing for since 2013. Bugreports filed, Googlers messaged on Google+. Nothing. String.split got fixed in 7.0 — because Google replaced their implementation with the OpenJDK one.
And when questioned about updating the SSLEngine, Google offers a Play Services API to do so — but starting with 9.0, will prevent any non-system apps from doing this on their own.
It's not just that Play Services offers additional functionality — AOSP functionality got removed. The Stepcounter API only reports steps taken while your app was open, requiring either a foreground notification, or using the Google Fit APIs instead. The first annoys users, the second is incompatible with HIPAA and half of European law.
Seriously, at every step of the way, Google throws boulders in the path of me, how am I supposed to support them?