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Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

A few weeks ago there was an article about Microsoft, Bing and Edge and their tracking of users, and it struck me that if Microsoft cared about mobile at this point, they are in a pretty good position to push a de-Google Android.

Microsoft has all the expertise in partnering with vendors and getting them to ship their operating systems, they have a rough idea about how to run an app store and they have access to developer. A de-Google, privacy focused Microsoft Android, with a Microsoft store, the ability to run native Android apps and perhaps .Net application, pushed by Microsoft sales and vendor channel seems pretty interesting to me.

But Microsoft doesn't care about neither privacy, nor mobile and practically no phone manufacturers really care to ship anything but Android at this point.

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> practically no phone manufacturers really care to ship anything but Android at this point

I sure as shit can't blame them - for a decade, Google tied Google Mobile Services (including things like Google Maps and the Play Store) to shipping Google's Android exclusively. If OEMs wanted to fork Android and drop Google for Microsoft, they'd (up until at least 2018) lose their license to GMS for all handsets sold. That changed in 2018 [0], when Google were told by the EU they would "... also need to stop preventing phone makers from using forked versions of Android" (from [0]).

I'm sure Google wouldn't pull any other licensing tricks to keep Microsoft or Huawei from making a competitive fork of Android now though! /s

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/18/17580694/google-android-e...

>I'm sure Google wouldn't pull any other licensing tricks to keep Microsoft or Huawei from making a competitive fork of Android now though! /s

Yup, the lack of a YouTube app (and Google actively blocking MS's attempt to create one) was a large factor in the death of Windows Phone.

Really? I rarely watch YouTube on my phone. It's like watching video through a toilet roll. Much rather watch it on my computer screen or TV.

The one exception is a waiting room or long train ride but really if I have any bigger screen available I'd go for that.

In the second quarter of 2021, mobile devices accounted for 63 percent of YouTube viewing time worldwide. In contrast, consoles and connected TVs reported a share of views corresponding to three percent and 14 percent of the total, respectively.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1173543/youtube-viewing-....

Cool, I didn't expect that.

Consoles I don't use either, but I mainly use my PCs for watching it. I find it so extremely inconvenient to watch it on my phone that I never do that at home.

Huawei has a competitive fork of Android, but it's not interested in the West anymore, so it's not going to compete on the US market.

> it's not interested in the West anymore

Respectfully, I'm not sure it was entirely Huawei (the company)'s decision. Being a major multi-national from mainland China, calling them "an arm of the CCP" isn't really fair, but neither is it entirely false.

More to the point - I tried to avoid being misleading; the arm-twisting (we know of) ended in 2018. But between the precedent, and the dozen other proprietary Google frameworks and legal agreements that could be serviced to this end in confidential OEM deals, I'm completely unsurprised nobody else has really stepped up.

> nobody else has really stepped up

Amazon's Fire phones and Fire tablets were certainly another example at forking Android (and providing replacement versions of the services), but Amazon had to find a hardware OEM that didn't already make Android devices for anyone else, due to Google's anticompetitive licensing requirements.

They know how to run an app store, but they know zero about making it a success. Everyone abhors the windows app store :) even the Mac one is more popular.

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