Comment by Brakenshire
11 years ago
> While it might not be an official requirement, being granted a Google apps license will go a whole lot easier if you join the Open Handset Alliance. The OHA is a group of companies committed to Android—Google's Android—and members are contractually prohibited from building non-Google approved devices. That's right, joining the OHA requires a company to sign its life away and promise to not build a device that runs a competing Android fork.
...
> This makes life extremely difficult for the only company brazen enough to sell an Android fork in the west: Amazon. Since the Kindle OS counts as an incompatible version of Android, no major OEM is allowed to produce the Kindle Fire for Amazon. So when Amazon goes shopping for a manufacturer for its next tablet, it has to immediately cross Acer, Asus, Dell, Foxconn, Fujitsu, HTC, Huawei, Kyocera, Lenovo, LG, Motorola, NEC, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, Toshiba, and ZTE off the list. Currently, Amazon contracts Kindle manufacturing out to Quanta Computer, a company primarily known for making laptops. Amazon probably doesn't have many other choices.
That is fairly incredible, I'm surprised it is not an anti-trust/competition issue.
It's not anti-trust because they're not required to only build Android devices. HTC and Samsung also build Windows Phone devices...
Are you serious? What other commercial OS can I do a competing fork of? Don't you see that the same restrictions apply to all other consumer OSs (iOS, WP, etc) by simply being closed-source?
That's a fair point, but Android is open source (and indeed was heavily marketed on that basis). They don't get to use any mechanism they like to make the situation comparable to their closed competitors. Their situation is also not comparable to iOS, WP, etc, because of their position of market dominance, just the same as the situation with Windows and Mac OS back in the day.
That's a fair point, but Android is open source (and indeed was heavily marketed on that basis). They don't get to use any mechanism they like to make the situation comparable to their closed competitors.
Android is open source; their services and corresponding apps aren't, and that's what they use as leverage. Not allowing them the same rights over those as other companies have over their proprietary software is essentially punishing them for having released something as open source.
And yes, Android is open source, and the Kindle Fire proves it. The fact that some people expect Google Play et all to be bundled is not Google's fault.
Their situation is also not comparable to iOS, WP, etc, because of their position of market dominance, just the same as the situation with Windows and Mac OS back in the day.
But Windows was, and while Microsoft was criticized for a lot of anticompetitive plays, not allowing people to create forks of Windows was never one of them. Not to mention that Google does allow you to create forks of Android, they just don't give you access to their services on top of that.