I don't understand the point of this article especially the bit about being an evil genius by ways of making excellent best in business cross OS api's. Really? being competitive is being an evil genius? If amazon is willing it can open there api's to none FireOS apps they have the infrastructure and money to support it, but they don't.

As a user I'm happy that Google is making sure that I can hop device manufactures without loosing my apps or functionality, if everybody would roll out there own app store and removed Google's you would be locked in with the OEM. Now you can safely change to a different phone, also they don't mind you downloading the Google apps when using an alternative ROM.

Android is open source but does that mean that you are not aloud to make money of it by providing closed source apps and service, many open source companies do that. The work that went in to Android if freely available for competitors. Lots of kernel enchantments went back in to Linux and now you have Ubuntu touch and Firefox OS both based on the Android kernel which in turn is based on Linux, how cool is that.