Amazon is reportedly working on a plan to place its services at the heart of various Android phones.
The Amazon Fire Phone was the retail giant’s first – and so far only – crack at the smartphone marked. It flopped spectacularly.
But that doesn’t appear to have put Amazon off. Rather, it is said to be adopting a different strategy in its bid to form a significant mobile presence.
According to The Information, Amazon is approaching third party Android smartphone manufacturers to deeply integrate its services into their hardware.
This “factory level” implementation would go much further than simply preloading smartphones with Amazon apps. Rather, it would effectively turn such smartphones into mini Fire tablet experiences, with Amazon services at the very core.
Rather than a single stand-alone Amazon Fire Phone, we’d have a number of variously branded Amazon Fire Phones.
Of course, Amazon likely faces a massive challenge convincing manufacturers to adopt its software. Doing so may well block those manufacturers from ongoing access to the Google Play Store and Google Play Services.
Related: Best Android phones
What’s more, as Ars Technica points out, Google’s ‘anti-fragmentation’ clause means that manufacturers must support Google services on all of their Android devices if they want continued access to the Google Play Store. In other words, no forking allowed – even as a little experiment on the side.
For Amazon’s plan to be success, then, it would need to rethink its own heavy-handed Google service replacement strategy. The online retailer has it all to do, if this report proves accurate.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
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