Microsoft gets Android Apps, Amazon expands its app store and Google is shunted out of the Microsoft eco-system.
I see this as an absolute brilliant thing to happen to the app ecosystem.
I really hope innovation accelerates on the Amazon App store.
We'll see about this one. Last I checked, half of Microsoft's own apps couldn't run on Android if Play Services was disabled.
And it's very likely Google will find ways to retaliate against Microsoft for working with the Amazon Appstore here. They are pretty aggressive against forks. Honestly, I would suspect the next Duo won't be able to run Play Services, because Microsoft dared to work with a competing Android app store.
Just speculating - I know nothing about Android support at Microsoft.
Seems like all the major OS are betting that mobile is going to be the focus of future native app development and don't want desktop users to miss out.
No one can match the level of integration Apple had made on Windows and Android platform.
We'll see what kind of limitations and bugs to show up.
Same as Microsoft copying Chrome and calling it Edge, users have another browser, now with MS telemetry etc. instead of Google. Good for user choice but hardly innovation.
(I don't really follow how your comment related to the issue.)
iOS is 54.33% of all tablets, Android is 45.57%. Microsoft, Amazon, and everyone else combined account for 0.1%
It doesn't seem like an ecosystem Google has the time to worry about.
Has the iOS apps on M1 Macs incentivised developers to do anything, apart from just opt out of the program?
For MS I think this could be a modest low risk win, even if it doesn’t massively take off. It gets them at least some tablet apps, and some popular social apps for desktop, without having to incentive developers to port them.
Maybe another big company will pick it up, but if not, I don't see much benefit to the hobbyist community over the current status quo if Android gets "opened up" more but also loses 99+% of total corporate backing toward its development. Even if Amazon or MS run with it (and maybe that's what this is the beginning of?) that seems more like an on-life-support scenario than one with a bright future for Android.
Could go totally differently if major phone and tablet manufacturers ignore the New Shiny Thing and stick with Android so developing commercial software for it remains viable, I guess.
Their new wearables partnership with Samsung may help here. Maybe Samsung would play along with a new Fuchsia phone OS. But there's still the developer issue; any new OS like this would need Android-backward compatibility support exactly similar to what Microsoft is doing here. "Android" in this sense doesn't mean "the OS"; its the application system.
What's happening in the Android world right now is so healthy and excellent, I almost can't believe its the product of Big Tech. Google is already pushing Android apps on ChromeOS, now Microsoft has them on Windows, through the Amazon app store, and nowhere in any of this is the actual Android Operating System. The comparison here isn't Android vs iOS vs Windows; its Android vs Flutter vs Web. Its a new way of writing "native"-adjacent multiplatform applications; the OS doesn't matter anymore.
Sure the touch-friendly UI will suck in some applications, on some deployments of Windows. That's not Android's fault; its on the developer to recognize the input method and canvas size, and adjust accordingly. I hope more do!
Possibly the app ecosystem will survive, even if the OS itself withers into obscurity, provided Fuscia can run Android apps (seems likely, but I haven't kept up with news on that sort of thing)
All the "cool" new Google features and performance upgrades may be Fuchsia only. I wouldn't bank much on Amazon. They just need an OS to run their readily disposable devices. I don't see them putting too much effort into this.
Google is going the hold the hand of manufacturers and ease them into it.
At least if Google had any sense this is how it would be done.
It could amount to little, of course. Even iOS apps on MacOS as a concept and practice has not remotely the luster ardent Apple acolytes predicted, certainly not yet even 7 months in.
If only someone had thought about that before: a language targeting a bytecode interpreter and an ecosystem of library sitting on top of the operating system in order to be able to run programs on any operating system. In a way we could call it a virtual machine as it makes the OS insignificant. Written like this it sounds like 1994 tech. A shame we had to wait so long...
There are people who complain about how the industry is moving in cycles and how what's old is new again and how functional languages did that back in 1922. These people don't change the world; they just complain about how other people are changing it.
Just because it is bytecode it doesn't mean it is interpreted.
> Unlike some other virtual-machine architectures in which the virtual instructions are interpreted at run time, TIMI instructions are never interpreted. They constitute an intermediate compile time step and are translated into the processor's instruction set as the final compilation step. The TIMI instructions are stored within the final program object, in addition to the executable machine instructions. This is how application objects compiled on one processor family (e.g., the original CISC AS/400 48-bit processors) could be moved to a new processor (e.g., PowerPC 64-bit) without re-compilation. An application saved from the older 48-bit platform can simply be restored onto the new 64-bit platform where the operating system discards the old machine instructions and re-translates the TIMI instructions into 64-bit instructions for the new processor.
The most recent phone that shipped with Tizen had a 480 x 800 pixel display.
And then there was this Pascal VM available across all 16 bit home computers, starting at the UCSD.
They aren't just going to turf Android.
And that's good for us because, should the Amazon App Store become more viable for manufacturers, Google might find themselves increasingly losing control of Android, and increasingly forced to make the Play Store more competitive.