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> App developers are being told to use React Native as an application framework

I was really excited. Until reading this.

Why is that?
React Native is very unreliable and unproductive, you write your code in JavaScript, that then gets executed in a VM, that then calls some glue code that may or may not work reliably, when these don't work: good luck debugging it.

React itself became quite a mess as well nowadays, it's becoming bigger and more bloated with each release. You can now very easily re-create the AngularJS hell in React.

JavaScript doesn't scale in productivity and in terms of performance, TypeScript solves the productivity problem, but you still suffer a lot due to JavaScript's poor runtime performance characteristics.

I hate JavaScript with a passion and wish there were better/more options for writing UIs these days, without getting sucked into it.
Personally, I like flutter a lot, its web story is subpar in my opinion but that's one of the only downsides for me.

If you only need native platforms and/or just want to use the web target as an app demo, it's a good option, it feels very solid and productive

JavaScript is disgusting
At least it isn't PHP.

And it begat JSON, which is nice.

It's so so hard to imagine Amazon actually building any useful or interesting ecosystem. They won't open source these works. They probably won't talk about them. Another black knight contender in the tech world. There'll end up having to be some kind of sdk, some outreach to devs, but most of this is going to be a huge black box that no one can read anything about. A dark OS.

Maybe just the modern Nintendo strategy of having no third party software is enough, works out. Maybe the big mainstreams apps will all sign up.

> Maybe just the modern Nintendo strategy of having no third party software is enough

Have you looked at the Nintendo store?

You mean just like iOS?
Even in this thread people are asking about Google's handling of android requiring anti trust intervention. No shot a company would open source their os in the future, when apple has shown you can lock down a 30% tax on all app installs and draw no attention for some reason.
Are you living years in the past? Apple is literally preparing side loading and third party stores support right now because of the EU Digital Markets Act.
Good that they finally had a change of heart and nobody had to force them to do the right thing.
I wonder how much of aws is closed source.
I imagine it’ll be _nearly_ android app compatible, so no need for sdk
Why not entirely compatible? Can’t have the Google bits though, which makes most stuff not work anyway, I guess.
What are the advantages of doing this rather than just using or forking AOSP?
Arstechnica [0] has a better article on it.

The tl;dr is that Amazon already uses a fork of Android called FireOS. However, Google makes manufacturers sign a contract that says that if they manufacture devices that run Android, they cannot manufacture other devices that use forks of Android. This was making it difficult for Amazon to find manufacturers that could make device with FireOS, so Amazon is ditching Android entirely.

0: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/amazon-fire-tablets-...

Let's say Amazon creates their own OS. Google then makes manufacturers sign a contract that says if they manufacture devices that run Android (with access to Google Play services), they can't manufacture devices that use forks of Android or Amazon's from-scratch OS.

If it's an anti-trust violation, then it's an anti-trust violation whether it's a fork of Android or not. If it isn't an anti-trust violation, then Google can ban things that aren't forks of Android too.

If it's legal for Google to force manufacturers not to use Android-based FireOS, then they could also force manufacturers not to use Vega-based FireOS. It feels like Amazon needs to challenge the legitimacy of those Google contracts or else they may find themselves in another situation where Google just amends their manufacturer contract to disallow Android forks and Vega-based FireOS.

> If it's an anti-trust violation, then it's an anti-trust violation whether it's a fork of Android or not. If it isn't an anti-trust violation, then Google can ban things that aren't forks of Android too.

Actually, the law often turns more on the intent of the person being investigated than on what they do. (Is this a good idea? No.)

Google can claim a more convincing fig leaf when they're regulating Android than they can when they're just saying "also, you can't work with Amazon". And that slight difference in plausibility can make a big difference in whether the same contractual clause is legal or illegal.

It's not the manufacturers (as in, the factory that makes the device). This has to do with inclusion of play services (I.e. An OEM like Amazon cannot ship incompatible Android forks if it wants in on the GMS/play services/play store ecosystem).

This would prevent Amazon from shipping those but they wouldn't be refused by factories.

This is more likely about control/NIH.

This seems like something the antitrust should look into either way.

I mean, it's almost literally what MS was doing with windows back in the 90s, isn't it?

Ha, seems like a way for Google to prevent Amazon from pulling the Hardware equivalent of Elasticsearch forking --> Opensearch.

"Hey, y'all can have our source code, but no one big try to copy our business plan with it"

They control the OS so people won't sideload other apps or, god forbid, port LineageOS on "their" devices.
I remember they were supposed to go that route with their Kindle Fire(?) a decade ago, but I'm not sure what was the result. I'm pretty sure I've not seen "get from Amazon store" buttons anywhere, so I'd assume it flooped.
Ah yes, so instead of Google ads you get Amazon ads.
I think it is better. At least they compete with each other.
Competition isn't always a good thing. For example, would you want multiple robbers competing to break into your home? I'd rather have zero.
We do have multiple robbers competing to break into our homes. We keep them out with locks and police but first of all we don't let them in and sit on our couch with us. I do have an Android phone and tablet. I use as little Google services as possible and never logged in, unless I have to as in the case of the Play Store to keep apps updated. But I don't buy anything from them and I install more and more from F-Droid.
Operating systems are valuable. Theft is not.
I do not anticipate this will be a race to see who can produce the best OS for the consumer, or the most privacy conscious OS either.
>Amazon’s new operating system is also based on a flavor of Linux

Cool. If it's not completely locked down like android and lets you access the console and has a real graphics toolkit, I could see it being being more useful than android.

This is welcome news. If it is not clunky/ugly/inconsistent like android it can be a good IOS alternative. Even better if they put up a walled garden and maintain quality app store but it would probably be similar to the "prime" experience, worse than what google is doing already.

But there is a silver lining: Amazon is a million times more human/user/customer friendly than Google. No more random account cancellations and human friendly UI.

Wow, what an obvious way to burn cash!
It's not like AWS doesn't have experience institutional experience with Linux.
Oops, saw my typo. Sorry it was late.
This will be Lab126, not AWS
Looking at the mess that is Amazon Linux 2023, I wouldn’t give that too much weight.
What mess? Moved most of our workloads to it. been quite pleased
Curious what makes it a mess?
Amazon Linux is just one platform that is directly customer facing. Linux is used indirectly in lots of parts and the teams submit lots of patches to upstream.
We just need Linux kernel + whatever is needed for containers, what mess?
This sounds like NIH.

>Vega is primed for lower-power devices that struggle with the bloat that Android, ostensibly a mobile phone OS, comes with,

What bloat? Android already is designed for low power devices.

All the adware. Clean Android (aosp) is much more efficient because it works only for the user instead of spending most of its cycles spying on them.

Of course Amazon adds it's own adware in FireOS so moving to another OS won't improve this.

If you remove the bloat you aren't shipping because of the exact same problem amazon was facing so they started to develop their Linux based OS. Did you read either the article or the comments?
The article was saying that FireOS, Amazon's fork of AOSP, was bloated.
Something Wayland based would be interesting.
Looking forward to more competition.