The fact they're ending this makes me wonder if the rumors of Amazon fully abandoning AOSP as the basis for FireOS are true. If so, it would be ending it because there won't be an appstore with updated apps before long.
Doesn't make much sense. Building an ecosystem is far, far more difficult than throwing together a small embedded OS. Just ask Samsung and LG (and Google for that matter). Maybe Amazon has enough clout to force all streaming app developers (and game developers, which is the new frontier, and ad platforms) to suck it down and build support for the new platform but I doubt it - plus the ROI is just not there. Why destroy an active well working ecosystem - to accomplish what exactly?!
- Build a credible software stack - from UI kits to audio and video codecs
- Convince the streaming companies to build one more flavor of their apps (in addition to Android/FTV, AppleTV, Roku, and a bunch of SmartTV platforms)
- Build ad stack and also convince major ad platforms to build their respective ad SDKs for the new platform (believe me, even for established platforms this takes years)
And all of this - to accomplish precisely what??? To wean away from Android? Why? There are no licensing issues, Amazon has grown a tremendous expertise in Android, which underlies most of its devices. Why throw all of this away???
Unlike Amazon, Samsung is much more tethered to Google, because they cannot afford to diverge in Android experience for the phones. They tried to cut this Gordian Knot by building Tizen and they learned their lesson the hard way. But at least for them there was a strategic benefit of moving away from Android. There is no such benefit for Amazon.
> - Convince the streaming companies to build one more flavor of their apps (in addition to Android/FTV, AppleTV, Roku, and a bunch of SmartTV platforms)
Amazon already has to convince them to support Fire apps today. The userspace fork (no Google Play APIs at all) has already diverged enough that software developers think of it as a very different platform no matter how many Android dev tools they share. I certainly see that reflected in lots of streaming company's release notes.
How much is Amazon actually benefiting from a shared Android kernel when userspace is so vastly different today?
Given they already have a diverged userspace and fewer tethers to Google doesn't that make more sense for Amazon to experiment with something like Tizen than Samsung does? Amazon has way more ability to lift and shift their unique user experience without disrupting their users for first party apps, and with how limited the Amazon App Store has become, probably fewer complaints about third-party apps, too.
(Tizen is just an example, of course, but can't help but think that an Amazon-Samsung partnership on Tizen even sounds like a fascinating political game versus Google at this point. Seems unlikely to happen, Amazon doesn't seem to want partnerships like that, but an interesting idea in theory.)
They just want to get a grip back on the platform they built. They let the cat out of the bag too long and Fire devices were too much of a loss leader from people pirating and running third party software and services on them that Amazon decided to take their fenced garden and hike it up to a full-on wall.
It's not possible before Amazon can build their own browser that runs on their own OS. (Or, if they can somehow get the Android/Linux version of Chrome run on the OS.) As simple as that.
