Oh man, the Fire Phone has so many problems as a product. As someone who turned a large Android Google Play app into a Fire Phone compatible one, I think it took me literally a day to swap out the Google Maps implementation with the Amazon Maps one and that was very nearly it. I'm convinced that the hijacking the swipe to go home was the real killer of that thing. I honestly don't know how people actually used that thing because scrolling on any list in any app basically left you with 50:50 odds of heading back to the home page.

I'm not stating that the problem isn't hard, just that the Fire Phone had other issues.

Amazon tried to make their own copy of Play Store, not Play Services.

Huawei already does this in China, where Google services are blocked.

Their problem isn't implementing these things. Their problem is convincing non-Chinese developers to port their apps to Huawei's ecosystem.

Well, yes, but maybe the failure was more due to not many users being willing to accept that much vendor lock-in, rather than issues with Amazon's Android version?

Amazon's phone failed because it was a new product in a very crowded market that didn't offer anything new of significance.

Aw c'mon, it's just software.