I'll say it: the Amazon APIs are actually better than some of the Google equivalents too. MS can play exactly the same game, but with the muscle of small business users.

Windows Phone simply has negligible actual interest from the dev community because it's too much of a technical island, and tied to the whole Metro disaster.

Edit: fidotron, to me it seemed China tried to get rid of Google (internal hacking attacks, etc). That level of aggression is normal for China?

The killer problem, from a western dev perspective, is you can only distribute free apps on the Play Store in China since Google don't process payments there. Their ad systems also do not work. Apple do not have these problems, largely since their surface area around problematic services is so much smaller.

Google are in a bit of a spot here, especially post Snowden basically showing the western govs were no worse than the Chinese (at least at monitoring, though maybe not in consequences of those being monitored) when the aggressive surveillance by the Chinese was stated as the reason for their withdrawal. It still amazes me how naive Googlers seem to be about issues with surveillance and security in general in a political sense, not merely a technical one.

And in so far as the western governments being no worse than the Chinese - what a bunch of crap.