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Comment by octosphere | Hacker News Reader

It would be so cool if Amazon had their own OS instead of relying on Android. They could use this on their Fire tablets and even have their own unique phone with a unique OS to sell. It's sad that the we have to choose between Android and iOS at every instance. I know of very few competitors (Like Purism).

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If Amazon had a mobile OS, it would probably be proprietary. Android has its faults, but at least an open Android stack is possible. I can't say I'd like to see Android lose ground to whatever Amazon would cook up.

I'd be happy for Android to lose some ground to competitors such as Windows, Sailfish, Tizen, a hypothetical Amazon OS, or almost anything else. While I appreciate the usable non-Google Android stack, the duopoly has gone too far, and there needs to be more competition in order to drive innovation and differentiating features.

Plus, it's not like Android will suddenly become less viable if it were to drop from ~85% to 65% market share.

Like turkeys wishing for another thanksgiving.

Ironically if Google will indeed switch to Fuchsia or another in-house OS, Android may survive in some form as their biggest competitor.

I can’t see them doing that without some form of binary compatibility.

Disclaimer: I work at google, but in an unrelated department, and have no inside knowledge / reads about what is going on with fuscia, and so my opinions aren’t more insightful than any other random engineer on the internet.

A fork of Android would probably be most successful in China where they don't rely on Google apps and services. I don't think there's much of a market for Android without Google outside of China.

I'm curious how long Google!Android will be supported once Fuschia launches. Maybe 2-3 years, and it depends on how many existing Android devices can move to Fuschia.

I don't think they will release Fuchsia and then immediately abandon Android. They will most likely release it for some low-end phones first and then work their way up. Maybe even release a Fuchsia Chromebook before any Fuchsia smartphone.

Android's strength over Windows Phone was the app ecosystem and I don't think an emulator will instantly be good enough to emulate all kinds of apps with sufficient performance, especially games.

It doesn't need to be an emulator. It would more likely be a compatibility layer, like Alien Dalvik or Wine.

They do. Or at least, they did. Well, sort-of, in the sense that it was still Linux. The e-ink kindles - at least the first several generations, I have no idea about the recent ones - were a pretty vanilla Linux with a java userspace managing the UI - but NOT android. The original Echo seems to use a version of the e-ink Kindle's OS, while newer Echos use FireOS aka Amazon's android fork.

Amazon really tried to make FireOS work as a google-free mobile OS, but just never got the volume. Ok, I guess they still sell those $50 tablets or whatever, but millions of Firedroid devices is still a rounding error compared to billions of Google Playdroid devices, or even hundreds of millions of Baidroid devices. Network effects dominate - even Apple has a hard time with maps for exactly this reason.

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