I think it’s even simpler than that: they want a share of Google’s data, and more control about what ads they can show to their customers constantly. Their hardware platforms are okayish and sold for a quite low price, but they monetize it on ads.
Amazon’s Fire devices already have this, they don’t use Android with Google, they use the fully open source version. They can collect any data they want already
Exactly this. There’s no nefarious motive to doing this, because Amazon can already do everything nefarious that they want to do with their current Android-based Fire OS.
I’m actually willing to take Amazon’s reasoning at face value for this. They say that Android is too heavyweight and inflexible for embedded IoT devices, and that they want to build something lighter. This makes plenty of sense, and is indeed something that Google themselves have also said as justification for their move to Fuschia for their own embedded devices.
For Linux fans, it’s probably a good thing that Amazon has chosen another Linux-based architecture rather than doing as Google are doing and moving off Linux to a different kernel.
All I have to ask is why though? They already have access to skinned aosp and from there can(and do)quite a bit of tweaking on their own. Fireos has been a worse version of android for some time now and Im unsure what the benefit of making their own in house OS would be.
If it’s a true GNU/Linux OS with compatibility with linux programs, then that would be kind of neat, and if it’s open enough to let advanced users install flatpaks(I suspect it’s going to be immutable so at least flatpaks would be nice) then that could be neat. Currently it’s very easy to sideload on fireos devices and even install the play store in full so it’s possible the end product could be more like the steamdeckOS which is very much a user friendly store front end with a power user true linux experience underneath.
That said, for some reason I suspect that they will be locking things down even more and its going to be one of those many user facing linux devices that’s technically linux but very limited. Like a smart fridge interface or something. If this is the case then dropping android support would be a bad move. You lose easy/lazy portability to your store from developers who already have a product to sell and you lose many apps that already exist, and for power users you lose access to the many apps that can easily be side loaded like tachiyomi(though I imagine amazon would rather you buy from them than buy their subsidized $80 tablets to read pirated manga/comics and library books on libby)
But who knows if they actually do an OK job this could lead to a new wave of GNU compatible touch forward apps for the rest of us. Linux has gotten a lot better at touch forward design over the last 4 or 5 years on its own, but its still fairly rough.
These tentacular megacorporations are a problem. Amazon is OK as a merchant, MS as an OS developer, Google as a search engine… If they do vertical integration the market is corrupted.
Vertical integration is when you control the entire product, in consumer electronics Apple is the gold standard; they make the software, hardware, and processors then integrate them into iPhones and macBooks. Tesla is a good example in the automotive space, their goal with the mega-factories is "raw materials in, cars out" and they work to build as many of the parts themselves as possible.
Alternately Microsoft just makes a good enough OS that runs on good enough hardware from commodity vendors, so you get good enough computers. Most auto makers buy good enough components from 2nd and 3rd tier suppliers and integrate them into good enough cars.
That is a great explanation of what vertical integration is. I am not sure I see why it is inherently bad.
I guess a large vertically integrated option could make it hard for alternatives to compete. That is more of a monopoly problem than a vertical integration issue though.
I do agree with interoperability requirements though. I see nothing wrong with Apple offering a fully vertically integrated product. The issue is when I cannot run my own OS on the hardware, my own apps on their OS, or interact with hardware from other vendors.
But that’s exactly the problem. If the company is kind about it, or forced to play nice by effective regulation, there’s no issue. But if there’s no regulation and the company wants to, it tends towards monopolistic tendencies. And there’s nothing that incentivizes a company to play nice forever, in fact they’re incentivized to maximize profit. So Vertical Integration is bad without being checked.
since we’re sharing anecdotes… i have a desktop pc with an rtx2070 and ALL my issues are due to the gpu.
recently installed wlroots-nvidia from the AUR and it fixed the worst of it for now, but still getting glitches. i don’t recommend Sway when you’re on nvidia.
Don’t hold your breath just yet, it’s a step in the right direction but it’s far from being fully Wayland ready. I think the driver will only be fully ready some time after explicit sync protocol lands in Wayland (see gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/…/90)
It already has most of the Google stuff stripped out and any remaining parts will be easy to replace in comparison to rebuilding and maintaining a much larger software stack while also simultaneously retaining compatibility with all the android apps already on their app store.
They want to throw this OS on smart home/automative/IoT type things. Android works in these situations, but it’s not necessarily ideal. Thing was designed for phones. It’s likely the only phone firmware in history that’s also been put in cars, espresso makers, washer/dryers, microwaves, and TV’s.
I completely get why the first waves of smart devices tended to just use Android – it’s easy to develop on and “lightweight enough” that the tradeoffs involved were generally acceptable. But those qualities only take you so far. Companies moving on to develop their own in-house OS’s for all these devices was the obvious next step.
TBH Amazon has a whole zoo of devices. Even if they are putting a small team of 2 or 3 people in charge for porting this to each device, they might end up with a few hundred people
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