I think many people underestimate the success of Amazon's Fire tablets.
I took one of the best photos that I took in the last ten years on a Fire tablet: that's a combination of the camera being "good enough" (though nowhere near as good as my iPad's camera) and being at the right place at the right time.
There was that time I was walking down the road and ran into a woman who had a huge dog that put its paws up on my shoulders and tried to push me down (in a friendly way.) She invited me into her trailer and I saw that a Fire tablet was her only computer. Although she'd never heard of Android and didn't seem so sure that Amazon had anything to do with it she was reading email, sharing photos, watching videos and doing most of what people do in their digital life.
Fire will be hard to beat for a few reasons: (1) Amazon subsidizes the devices and can afford to do so because the device sucks people into the Amazon ecosystem, and (2) Amazon makes smart choices about what features to include and which not to.
I used to have a Nexus 7 and I liked it a lot but it was packed with sensors that pushed up the BOM. Amazon is able to make tough decisions that Google somehow just can't do.
Any word on whether Flutter should be the default method of writing apps for phones and tablets? For that matter: any word if Fuchsia will be coming to tablets or phone-sized devices?
Specially after Kotlin Native matures its JetPack Compose implementation in iOS.
The official Android framework ported to iOS, with its main language, versus a framework that belongs to an external team with no vote on either platforms.
Google Pay/Google Wallet is such a joke. I cannot get it to reliably work in the browser and launching it on Android (as in, accepting Google Pay in an app) is an opaque process with non-existent support.
I'm tempted to just drop it in the app since so few people used it on the web (compared to Apple Pay) and since Google doesn't care it's hard for me to care.
So? Google has a reputation for killing projects left and right. They are known for creating gates to keep people locked to their ad system. Manifest v3 is an atrocity. They cannot stop breaking the web in order to ship more ads.
I took one of the best photos that I took in the last ten years on a Fire tablet: that's a combination of the camera being "good enough" (though nowhere near as good as my iPad's camera) and being at the right place at the right time.
There was that time I was walking down the road and ran into a woman who had a huge dog that put its paws up on my shoulders and tried to push me down (in a friendly way.) She invited me into her trailer and I saw that a Fire tablet was her only computer. Although she'd never heard of Android and didn't seem so sure that Amazon had anything to do with it she was reading email, sharing photos, watching videos and doing most of what people do in their digital life.
Fire will be hard to beat for a few reasons: (1) Amazon subsidizes the devices and can afford to do so because the device sucks people into the Amazon ecosystem, and (2) Amazon makes smart choices about what features to include and which not to.
I used to have a Nexus 7 and I liked it a lot but it was packed with sensors that pushed up the BOM. Amazon is able to make tough decisions that Google somehow just can't do.