Comment by chaosharmonic

5 days ago

> This isn't an isolated attempt. You can see more of the same thing with Android.

Here are more:

- (jumping off of your second point...) Play Services does more than just handle stuff you sign into as a user -- it's also a dependency for everything from push notifications to screen casting. This actively poses issues building competing platforms, in that in order to give developers a path to shipping in your ecosystem you have to provide functioning alternatives to all of those ancillary features. The compatibility issue also impacts user adoption, and then the user adoption and the barren marketplace impact each other... Even the combined resources of Amazon and Microsoft weren't enough to overcome this. (Facebook did, but I'm also not sure forking the OS into a separate VR platform is necessarily the same thing.)

- It also comes with integrity checking, so even if you do find a good third party image, and sideload Google packages, numerous things won't work unless you take part in a dumb arms race that ironically requires you to also root your device. By which I mean a feature that was originally built for banking applications is now used everywhere from streaming services (as an additional layer of DRM) to gacha games (for anti-cheat). This is actually the entire reason I dropped Pokemon Go, personally.

Obligatory link to the excellent Ars piece on this topic: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-grip-on...

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chaosharmonic

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deanCommie  5 days ago

> Even the combined resources of Amazon and Microsoft weren't enough to overcome this.

Pedantically, their resources were never combined. They independently tried to compete, and they independently failed.

For what it's worth though, Amazon seems to be doing tidy business with entrypoint tablets and FireOS, which is a fork of Android, but still one they own.

Microsoft's exit of mobile was a short-sighted decision IMO. They have the entire office suite. They have windows and Windows has essentially become an app store model too.

I can easily imagine a future where Microsoft leaned in hard on Microsoft Mobile-exclusives for Word/Outlook/Excel/Teams/etc., bundled it with the rest of Office/Windows subscriptions, and had every office worker in the world carrying a windows phone for their work device.

I know, I know - everyone wanted only an iPhone. But it feels to me like Microsoft didn't try very hard.

  • Vilian  5 days ago

    They can't properly port the office to android today, imagine years ago, also office in cellphone were never great

  • chaosharmonic  3 days ago

    > Pedantically, their resources were never combined. They independently tried to compete, and they independently failed.

    I'm talking about Windows Subsystem for Android, which leveraged Amazon's app store.

    Though honestly, their application strategy since Windows 8 has been fascinating. Watching them:

    - ship Linux and Android app support

    - replace their first-party browser with a Chrome derivative (and inherit all the PWA support of its parent)

    - ship first-party support for .NET and PowerShell on other platforms

    - ship React Native builds for Windows and macOS

    ...all suggest they're really trying not to get into the same hole as what happened with Metro, by giving you a lot of different ways to build something that can then run on modern versions of Windows -- regardless of whether that's even necessarily your goal.

niutech  5 days ago

You can root your Android device and replace Google Play Services with microG (https://microg.org).