parislemon: "Free"

What a day for Android. It was just pushed behind the scenes as the thing that powers that awesome, cheap Amazon Kindle tablet. And made into that thing you pay Microsoft to use.
— parislemon

Warning: What follows might be a structureless rant. I blame hunger. I promise I’ll eat something after I finish the rant.

I think the Android experiment hasn’t gone as well as Google had hoped for. It is a big target for lawsuits; it’s hugely fragmented because its versions and hardware support got out of control; it’s not open anymore because they realized they need more control; developers are not making a lot of money; it attracts developers who don’t care as much about UX as iOS developers do; it uses sugar rich code names; its main dev language is Java which is also a huge target for lawsuits… so many problems. I’d rather pay a “premium” price and get a device that “just works”; I’d rather give up 30% of revenue and actually have a chance to make money without showing ads on my apps. Like Marco Arment said in the last episode of Build and Analyze. If your make money on eye balls then you probably should be on Android even though most users won’t even know how to download an app or from which store to download them from. I’m glad Amazon is putting the Android codebase to a good use, by forking it and creating a product that stands a chance.