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Comment by jph | Hacker News Reader

The Fire phone is a gorgeous hardware success in my opinion -- if you try it, it's fast and sleek. The Firefly scanner is super-convenient for shopping.

The show-stopper issue for me is the UI. It feels as if screen elements are sloshing, or hard to find, and the UI is hard to use when I'm in motion.

I expect the UI will be easy for Amazon to solve. The phone is a version 1 and a strong debut -- even if it didn't sell well.

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Someone who isn't me helped work on this portion of the project. The system UI was written and re-written a half dozen times. They tried to do it internally, they tried design agencies, they tried consultants, and all failed miserably. Not because they sucked, but because the Amazon management team was nearly impossible to deal with. Developers would get conflicting requirements from multiple stakeholders, who would then argue like children. You had managers who would throw a tantrum if they didn't get a pet feature in. Etc, etc.

The last I heard, they basically downloaded the android OS, and re-wrote all of the system UI framework components. Of course, this meant that most android apps broke because they failed to make all of the options functional, so they spent somewhere around twice the time fixing issues as they did writing them.

> ...and a strong debut -- even if it didn't sell well.

I'm not sure one follows from the other... how exactly did the Fire make a "strong debut"?

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