Android is Forked
An interesting thing to know about the Kindle Fire is that it’s an Amazon tablet. You’ll notice that Amazon never mentions this anywhere. This is because they’ve taken the ‘Open’ Android source code and forked it to make their own OS.
Such is Google’s downside of making Android open source.
So far they’ve had phenomenal success entering the mobile market and offering a free OS to anyone who’ll take it, and driving incumbents out of business (Nokia, RIM, Palm/HP). But the very thing that made this possible is also enabling Amazon to possibly turn the tables on Google. At least in the tablet space.
I can see The Kindle Fire doing far better than any Android tablet, and the Android App Store becoming the go-to place for apps on all Android devices.
The main reason mobile device makers have been going obeying Google’s rules with Android is so they can have all of Google’s services on their devices Most importantly: the Android Marketplace. This new generation of mobile devices is all about apps, after all.
If Amazon can offer more popular equivalents of these free services, compatible with any version of Android (forked or not), then device makers will no longer have much of an incentive to obey Google’s rules.
It would be ironic to see Google left out in the cold watching the android they created ride off into the sunset with all their competitors at the helm. There is a lot that needs to play out for this to happen, but with the release of Kindle Fire the possibility is becoming more real.
