Nice! And they will probably differentiate from the competition by allowing GPL applications and sideloading, and having a total control for your privacy and no tracking, right?
Right?
In the beginning? Sure. Later? Well, you know, security and all, think of the kids!
Yeah and maybe Bezos will finally allow his workers to have bathroom breaks
Check out these great special offers in GPL applications and sideloading!
They want to harvest the data, without Google's control, and give none to Google.
That can be easily done with AOSP, to my knowledge there's no Google stuff in there. Which is exactly what they're using right now
There still is some google stuff in there, like for example phoning google servers to check internet connectivity among other stuff.
Yes, but those minor traces are easy enough to remove, especially if you don't care about being "ceritified" by Google (i.e. are not planning to run the Google services).
Hahahaha cool, Linux with ads and tracking and all the spyware you could ever want.
So just like android ?
Minus the sandboxing and security improvements, apparently
I wonder if it's going to be as terrible as their Fire OS.
The author is exited but I'm not. I am not a big fan of corporations taking the free work of FOSS developers and turning it into a proprietary dystopia.
A third competitor for Android and iOS would be amazing. But not if it's Amazon..
https://pine64.com/product-category/pinephone/
https://pine64.com/product-category/smartphones/pinephone-pro/
There is already something in the works (that you can technically buy right now if you wanted), and it actively respects your freedom. Granted, as with everything in this ecosystem, its a very slow burn, so it'll be a while before the software is actually good, but it's already made massive strides from where it started.
I would say wait a bit and take a look at this later, but i do have one friend daily driving one now to some success (this wasn't possible a year ago).
I just read an article about how they're increasing advertising on their Fire TVs. Rest assured, an Amazon OS is an Advertising OS.
Although, from what I've gathered of public opinion online, there's LOTS of people willing to forgo their privacy in exchange for free shit.
Edit: Oh...
They say they expect Vega to begin shipping on Fire TVs early next year.
And that article https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/after-luring-customers-with-low-prices-amazon-stuffs-fire-tvs-with-ads/
Windows Phone: Electric Boogaloo
TL;DR Amazon is building a Linux distro that starts a chromium to run react native apps. Apparently, you need hundreds of people for that.
Oh so I won’t be able to sideload streaming APKs onto any new Amazon devices? Guess you can fucking keep your shit hardware then
oh great, yet another platform that will use free software to restrict what people can do with their computing devices 🤮
how is this supposed to be a good thing? 🙄
Apps are going to be written in React Native
So despite the desire for one, Vega won’t be an Android-killer, won’t bring an influx of big name apps to benefit regular Linux distros, nor see Amazon do something crazy cool like create its own Linux tablet UI.
You know how much overhead Electron apps are? Well, here's React Native! Enjoy all the annoyances of mobile development with the ugliest that is React!
(I kid. Or am I?)
Apps are going to be written in React Native
Idk if I'm the only person who thinks this, but I feel like React has gotten worse over the last couple of major versions. Not only does the code look a lot messier when you use their new syntax, but the end result seems unreliable. Facebook is barely even usable now. Their history management is laughable, and it'll drop you out of the site randomly when using the back buttons. I used to think React was really neat, but I'm not a big fan anymore. There's too much re-engineering for problems that were solved decades ago.
This is not what I meant when I said we need more Mobile OS competition...
Amazon out here thinking “could you imagine how much cheap garbage we could try to sell people if we can harvest literally all of the data directly?”
Amazon can't make TVs or ereades without filling them to the brim with ads and spyware like the greedy shits they are, I dont want to think about how screwed up their OS would be. As much as I sneer at Microsoft and windows BS as a snobby Linux user I get the impression amazon would be way worse and make Ol Gatey boy say 'have a little class, would you?'
These tentacular megacorporations are a problem. Amazon is OK as a merchant, MS as an OS developer, Google as a search engine... If they do vertical integration the market is corrupted.
Lmao, they can have fun with that. I can't imagine it being anything decent. A mobile phone equivalent of a DVD Player OS lol
Good luck getting all the developers to rewrite their apps. The only reason you had any apps was because it was based on Android so it was little to no effort to port. Going plain ol' embedded Linux is basically the death knell of your developer story. Source: been there, had no third party apps, switched to Android
I already tried an Amazon Fire tablet, Amazon. No thanks. I returned it. I don't need a locked-down console that spies on me. Windows is well on its way to becoming that already.
The only thing I care about in this is if they will contribute anything back to the open source ecosystem, be it code or anything else.
No chance. Amazon has a long history of using a ton of FOSS code on AWS and contributing fuck-all.
Absolutely hell no.
Probably because it is stupid simple to escape their ecosystem just by sideloading apps. They want to lock you down with their own OS.
Nice try Amazon. I'm not falling for it.
I know it won't happen, but it'd be nice if Linux switched to GPLv3. That would at least help somewhat here
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