In my opinion, Amazon should have gone with a generic budget phone to augment their "Amazon Basics" line of dependable, economical cables, USB hubs, and so forth.
I would make it a plain, vanilla Nexus-like phone running vanilla Android with no skins and not tied to any contracts or carriers, but priced $50 less than a comparable Nexus 5 or whatever is the current Nexus. Or else, make it about $400 but throw in a year of Prime to sweeten the deal. Maybe add a couple of features to distinguish it, such as a microSD memory expansion port. Forget the lame Amazon AppStore, or at least provide both -- AppStore and Google Play, and let the customer choose.
Such a device might not sell 20 million units in the first week, but it would sell a heck of a lot better than the Fire Phone did. Heck, I would have bought one. I went with a Nexus 5 just a couple of months ago, after the very pricey Nexus 6 was announced. There's a good market for a vanilla, plain Android phone, and Prime would make it a no-brainer.
The article makes Bezos sound a bit over-controlling and zany, but at least the author hastens to add that second guessing Bezos and Amazon is a risky business. Who knows? Perhaps the Fire 2 will get it right. (I hope Jeff's reading this!)
I have seen so many people blame Amazon for not including Google Play, but this is really Google's decision. In order to use Google Play Services, you need to make all of Google's services default and unremovable. This was done specifically so companies like Amazon could not include it on devices meant to push competing services. Even though I use plenty of Google software, I am more than happy to see them have competition. They honestly do not have enough, and I am glad Amazon is working to offer an alternative to total Google control on Android. Android is fine now, but increasing centralization is not going to benefit anyone but Google. Acquiescing and becoming just another company pushing Google services would be a terrible move for Amazon.
I'm surprised that so few other people on this comment thread seem to get it. Google Play and the associated Services ecosystem exists for the sole purpose of forbidding exactly what Amazon is trying to do. Amazon's sole purpose for this phone is as a way to get phone customers into their ecosystem first, and Google's stuff exists to get people on the Google ecosystem first. A first-party device with Google Play and Amazon services is Not. Gonna. Happen.
"Google Play and the associated Services ecosystem exists for the sole purpose of forbidding exactly what Amazon is trying to do"
Er... are you sure android apps for gmail, calendar, drive, youtube, maps etc. and not to mention, the play store for android exist for the sole purpose of blocking third parties? Surely they have their own utility to users... no?
I actually wouldn't be surprised if that were the case. They already don't allow third-party app stores (like Amazon's app store or F-Droid) on the Play Store last I checked; in both cases, you have to enable app installation from "untrusted sources" and download/install the APKs manually.
Android licencing means that no company is allowed to ship both Google Android and non-Google Android. This means that to ship Google Android on the phone they (Amazon) would have to ship Google Android on all Fire tablets too.
In addition under the licence Google apps need to be both installed (you have to have all of them, you can't pick and choose) and placed in particular prominent locations (so the Play Store needs to be on the first home screen). This would almost certainly mean that Google's store(s) would be have as good if not better positions than Amazon's own stores on the device. More than that there are restrictions around app stores which compete with Google play which would, at the very least, restrict Amazon's ability to pre-install and operate their own app store.
Given that Amazon's reason for making these devices in the first place is to sell content - videos, music, books and apps - stock Android is to all intents and purposes a non-starter for them.
I don't understand why that would be a problem. Pre-installing Google's stuff is a fair price to pay for getting a full-up Android OS for free.
Amazon's goal should be for it's apps and services to be fully competitive with everyone else's regardless of what phone they are on - iPhone, Nexus, Galaxy, Fire, shouldn't matter. I really don't see what the problem is with having Amazon's apps and services installed on the phone by default right alongside the ones from Google. Let the user decide. If users tend to prefer the Google stuff to Amazon's then they're not going to buy an Amazon locked-in Fire phone anyway.
Amazon's problem is that their apps don't come pre-installed on anyone else's phone by default. Making their own Fire phone solves that problem. It doesn't solve the problem of making Amazon's apps actualy competitive with everyone else's. That problem can only be solved by actualy making their apps good and desirable. If they aren't, locking Fire phone users into them isn't going to help sell any Fire phones and therefore isn't going to help gain exposure for Amazon's apps anyway.
I agree with you, and my point is simply this: AMZN should just sell a Nexus clone and be done with it. Does GOOG actually discourage phone makers from using their services? I don't think so.
Nexus is a reference design. So, I'll just copy Nexus but bundle Amazon Prime with it. What's not to love? So AMZN has to bundle their Amazon App or whatever on the phone; that's a given.
Unless, of course, GOOG has decided to actually make money off the Nexus phones, as indicated by their Nexus 6 pricing. But that's just opening up a market for a less expensive clone to be the logical replacement for the Nexus 4/5.
The whole point of the exercise is not to just ship volumes of units, but build an ecosystem (just like what Apple and Google are doing too). A budget phone doesn't work because it won't be geared up to play the music and video and all of the other traits Amazon is looking at with it's 'Fire' ecosystem.
> Forget the lame Amazon AppStore, or at least provide both -- AppStore and Google Play, and let the customer choose.
Again, the point here is NOT to let the customer choose, it's to force the consumer into their ecosystem instead of Googles.
Switching costs are high, so getting people hooked into the Amazon Appstore might mean a lifetime customer, etc. One of the reason Amazon has designed Fire Tablets for children.
And this is another reason the Fire Phone is having a hard time - developers think the Amazon AppStore is shit.
Everyone keeps implying there are super cheap super good chinese phones. Is there a site that reviews these or a link where an uninitiated can check the best options out?
They've all gotten good reviews for their hardware.
I don't think it's crazy to expect that Amazon could build a really solid "Basics" phone at around $200 - $250, since their competitors all do so with reasonable margins to spare.
I bought my phone from aliexpress last year. Since then, Haipai Noble has had 3 major versions, and a dozen minor hardware updates.
Decide on price, and find reviews online of popular Chinese phones. Make sure the have the hardware features you want at the price you want. And then follow safe buying rules. Don't buy from low sales vendors, nor bad scored vendors.
there are super cheap phones with okish hardware, but software is universally SHIT, from broken functions, lazy implementations, to malicious rootkits and spyware in factory roms
To expand on this, if the phone isn't particularly well-known, then you'll end up on your own if you want to replace the ROM/firmware with, say, CyanogenMod, since there won't nearly be as much development/porting momentum as there would be for a household-name device.
Well, to be fair, we don't think it's shit, we just don't think there are enough potential customers for the investment. It's not just "build to another store" - my servers have to have yet another push notification service route, I need to coordinate another App Store release schedule, I have to implement another IAP framework, implement another signing path, and buy and test another set of devices.
That's money, baby. Lots of it. And unlike Mr. Bezos, I don't have thousands - let alone millions - of dollars to burn.
It's the same reason we don't build to Windows app store or Blackberry app store without incentives from Microsoft or Blackberry to help get us there.
It's not just developers they need to convince. Even moderately sophisticated customers aren't going to want to buy into a not-as-good-as-Google's ecosystem.
Because it's pretty strictly worse than Google's Play Store. Some developers do go to the extra effort to support it, but not all, and almost none would create for the Amazon store without publishing on Google's.
> A budget phone doesn't work because it won't be geared up to play the music and video and all of the other traits Amazon is looking at with it's 'Fire' ecosystem.
A "budget phone" in price may not be a budget phone in capability. Amazon surely wouldn't be the first company with a loss-leader hardware device that encourages lock-in.
> I would make it a plain, vanilla Nexus-like phone running vanilla Android with no skins and not tied to any contracts or carriers, but priced $50 less than a comparable Nexus 5 or whatever is the current Nexus. Or else, make it about $400 but throw in a year of Prime to sweeten the deal. Maybe add a couple of features to distinguish it, such as a microSD memory expansion port. Forget the lame Amazon AppStore, or at least provide both -- AppStore and Google Play, and let the customer choose.
If they'd actually done this, it'd probably be a pretty good competitor to the Nexus 6, which is not a bad phone at all but departed quite a bit from the precedent of the Nexus 5, other than running stock Android. (Huge, very expensive.)
The Android market is ripe for a true successor of the Nexus 5, and Amazon would have made a lot of sense to fill that niche. The best thing we've got right now is the 2014 Moto X, which admittedly is a very good phone.
Yep. The power button on my Nexus 5 just went up and I had the choice of throwing money at a 14-month-old phone (which is a bit sooner than I had hoped to replace it but old enough that I had to think twice about paying for maintenance) or buying a new phone. Nexus 6 at $650 and in a larger form factor than I would like got me to buy a Moto X instead. $200 cheaper and in a more reasonable size made it the closest thing to a Nexus 5 replacement I ran across.
I would have gladly considered something from Amazon if it had been along the lines of an updated Nexus 5 (under $400, stock or virtually stock like the Moto X) even if, like the Nexus line, it sacrificed a bit of that premium "Cadillac" polish like the wooden back and metal edged frame. Only reason I even bothered with that is because there wasn't a cheaper Nexus that wasn't the year+ old N5.
Hell...don't even bundle gapps if you want to include the Amazon store...just as long as someone can build AOSP for it and I can install it myself.
When the Nexus 7 came out it was roughly equivalent to the Kindle Fire in terms of price and specs but other than fellow Android fans and tech site readers, I didn't know anyone else who bought a Nexus 7. Everyone I knew who wanted an affordable (read: cheaper than an iPad) but functional small tablet bought Kindle Fires so clearly their brand awareness and marketing is worth something if people were willing to buy an slightly inferior device for $50 more.
I have one, its called the Moto G. It comes with near stock Android, it costs $200 without a contract, and I freaking love it. To see the future of cell phones look at the story PC's: prices will fall and quality will become uniformly high- and margins will become razor thin, except for premium brands (aka Apple). This is a tough, tough kind of market for any company to enter.
I agree, but I think "budget" is the wrong concept.
It should've been "simple smartphone".
5 big buttons on the screen: (a) Phone, (b) Text / Email, (c) Music (d) Pictures, (e) Shop
(each of those apps linked into to Amazon services)
There is not really a market for making another hi-tech whiz-bang phone for nerds, that market is sewed up.
They need the phone version of their kindle. A one-week battery life. A device deceptively simple...something that soccer-moms would use while waiting for Timmy's soccer practice to finish.
Interestingly, I bet this is the tact Microsoft takes with their new Nokia announcements
I'd get this too, providing they really did just make a no bullshit phone with stock Android and no stupid skin like HTC and Samsung phones. I've been using Nexus phones for a number of years, but looking for alternatives now that Google has jumped on board the 'we don't know the fucking difference between a phone and a tablet' bandwagon. An extra app store in addition to (definitely not instead of) would be fine, and I'd probably use it.
Let's be honest, no one (rounding down) cares about vanilla android and microSD ports.
The only thing that's going to move the dial for an Amazon phone is exclusive hardware or software features and you can forget about third party software. They tried this angle and because they aren't that good at this in the first place (like Facebook), what they came up with stank.
I would make it a plain, vanilla Nexus-like phone running vanilla Android with no skins and not tied to any contracts or carriers, but priced $50 less than a comparable Nexus 5 or whatever is the current Nexus. Or else, make it about $400 but throw in a year of Prime to sweeten the deal. Maybe add a couple of features to distinguish it, such as a microSD memory expansion port. Forget the lame Amazon AppStore, or at least provide both -- AppStore and Google Play, and let the customer choose.
Such a device might not sell 20 million units in the first week, but it would sell a heck of a lot better than the Fire Phone did. Heck, I would have bought one. I went with a Nexus 5 just a couple of months ago, after the very pricey Nexus 6 was announced. There's a good market for a vanilla, plain Android phone, and Prime would make it a no-brainer.
The article makes Bezos sound a bit over-controlling and zany, but at least the author hastens to add that second guessing Bezos and Amazon is a risky business. Who knows? Perhaps the Fire 2 will get it right. (I hope Jeff's reading this!)