Comment by cromwellian
11 years ago
I think there is some legitimacy to this line of criticism, but as Amazon has shown, large organizations can produce their own forks.
I can imagine too that selective replacement of chunks of the 'Google Experience' might make consumers get a negative impression of the Google brand if the replacement has issues. Like if you replace the location with Skyhook or Nokia, and the new Maps app is just called "Maps", and if there are serious issues, consumers might say "Man, this Google Maps on Android sucks!" without realizing it's not Google Maps, because Android is strongly brand associated with Google.
There's also a logical rational for Amazon-style forking, in the sense that if you're going for a complete reskinning, the end result will likely be a lot better if it is completely horizontally and vertically integrated by a single vendor rather than cobbled together -- 'bloatware' experience.
I'm already disappointed by my inability to remove the (rather poor) Samsung apps from my phone, as I'd like to only use the 'proper' Google apps (for me, gmail/google calendar app is 50+% of phone usage). It's not enough for companies to be able to produce their own forks - the forks still need to be competitive or better than Google versions, and that's not so easy to do.