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Comment by Zak | Hacker News Reader

I think the main answer is smartphones displaced them. It's the same thing that happened to cheap digital cameras.

> As I understand it, Google requires Android devices to have colour screens and, so I've read, won't certify eInk eReaders for newer versions of Android.

Google has gone to great lengths to ensure that a phone without its proprietary libraries and SafetyNet attestation will not be palatable to mainstream consumers. An eReader is not a phone, and consumers do not have the same expectation that it will run every app in the Play store.

Some Boox brand eReaders use Android on monochrome displays, but those are far from the author's definition of cheap at $200+.

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Tablets too. I should be shocked that nobody has mentioned the aggressively low pricing of Amazon's Fire Tablets, but somehow Fire Tablets are invisible to the technorati. (e.g. people used to ask "Why are Android Tablets dead?" and the answer is that Samsung can't compete with half-priced tablets subsidized by AMZN any more than your local taxi company can compete with half-priced Uber rides subsidized by Softbank)

Not only are the fire tablets priced aggressively but they can be used to watch videos, surf the web, listen to music, play games, use remote desktop, all sorts of things. And if you lose one you are out $30 instead of $300 or so for an iPad.

Can’t speak for others but the bizarre Android fork Fires run is a big part of what makes me rule them out.

That, and I have an Android tablet that was ~$250 when new that has various aspects about it that are somewhere between awful and underwhelming, and I can’t imagine a $30 Fire tablet to be any better in that regard, subsidized or not. That said my tolerance for electronics being bad in any capacity I feel on a day to day basis is low.

I've had a lot of tablets. iPad is better than most of them but my feeling is that tablets are sorta disposable, even if you don't intended them to be disposable. [1] If you want to read the web, read PDFs, it doesn't really matter that you're running AMZN's fork and using AMZN's gimped app store because you need like: a web browser, a PDF viewer, maybe ssh and RDP clients and that's it.

The only (relatively) high end Android device I had was a Google Pixel, everything else has been a medium Samsung, BN Nook, I even had a $99 Windows tablet that was "good enough".

A lot of people who would want a Kindle would be pretty happy with a Fire, it is not so easy to read in peak daylight and the battery life is worse, but the value is good enough that AMZN has driven quality affordable Android tablets out with very little fanfare.

[1] I can't believe anyone gets an iPad Pro, but if I did I'd get an expensive case for it and treat it like a laptop. What I like about tablets is that I can take them places where they might get smashed.

Even if they’re technically sufficient in terms of specs and my use case is simple, if I see things like animations hitching, times when the tablet is struggling (e.g. while running updates), the screen being sub-par (low pixel density, bad viewing angles, etc), etc it’s going to bug me.

On tablets being disposable, it depends on the user. The only electronic device of mine that’s regularly in harm’s way is my phone, and it’s insured so if it gets smashed I have a new one in a day or two. Been carrying iPads as auxiliary devices while traveling for years and never had a problem.

> Google has gone to great lengths to ensure that a phone without its proprietary libraries and SafetyNet attestation

This SafetyNet nonsense is now why I begrudgingly have an iPhone. After playing cat and mouse with Google for a long while, I'd had enough. The main reason I was on Android was because of the freedom I had (or, used to have). If I have to be walled in, Apple has a better garden than does Google.

That's not an entirely unreasonable take, though sideloading apps is still fully available on Google-approved Android and it is not on iOS.

I only have one or two apps I actually want to use that required a SafetyNet bypass. I don't think it's people like us Google is targeting with that though; the main goal as it seems to me is to ensure an OEM won't be successful marketing a phone that funnels less money to Google.

> the main goal as it seems to me is to ensure an OEM won't be successful marketing a phone that funnels less money to Google.

In general such an attested environment provides guarantees a lot of software makers want. Starting from just anti-malware and anti-cheat ending with just DRM.

Some app developers might want attestation for those reasons, but Android is big enough that almost none of them would leave if it was unavailable.

All of these points are made in the article, nearly verbatim.

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