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Android Operating Systems

Amazon Confirms Fire TV Is Dropping Android (9to5google.com) 43

Posted by BeauHD from the behind-the-scenes dept.
According to a job listing spotted by AFTVNews, Amazon makes it clear that the company plans to ditch Android for its own "VegaOS" operating system. "The new platform is said to rely on React Native and would require new apps to be built," reports 9to5Google. From the report: As spotted by AFTVNews, a job listing from Amazon was looking for a "Fire TV Experience Software Development Engineer." The job listing's description makes it abundantly clear that a key part of the role is focused on the transition from Android to the rumored "VegaOS," because it quite literally says that's what is happening, with Amazon saying that Fire TV is transitioning from "FOS/Android" (Fire OS/Android) to "native/Rust" and even explicitly mentioning React Native. The listing, which has since been removed, provides extremely strong evidence of Amazon's plans, which is probably why it was so quickly removed.
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Amazon Confirms Fire TV Is Dropping Android More

Amazon Confirms Fire TV Is Dropping Android

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  • I misread and thought they'd capitalize on all the Win32 and MFC coders already out there and switch to ReactOS. I laughed when I saw my mistake then kinda tapped my chin thinking, "Now wait a minute. That actually isn't a terrible idea."

  • Amazon lock in (Score:5, Informative)

    by olmsfam ( 1399493 ) on Friday February 02, 2024 @07:39PM (#64209684)

    Gotta make sure you are locked in to that amazon store. Wouldn't want side loading or consumer choice.

    • Re:Amazon lock in (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rogoshen1 ( 2922505 ) on Friday February 02, 2024 @07:48PM (#64209698)

      you WILL watch the ads and be happy!
      (just kidding, you will go to pirate bay and download the shows you're already paying for via prime membership. Then watch them using kodi or plex, and you will be happy. Amazon can go pound sand. Get fucked Bezos*.)

      *or whoever is currently in charge of finding icebergs over at Amazon.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by xeoron ( 639412 )
      That side loading and unlocked fire devices are the only way they are used by all the people I know. I hate those devices, yet there is a massive community that only uses it because what they can side-load. They will lose a lot of business switching to this different OS.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dgatwood ( 11270 )

        That side loading and unlocked fire devices are the only way they are used by all the people I know. I hate those devices, yet there is a massive community that only uses it because what they can side-load. They will lose a lot of business switching to this different OS.

        On Fire TV? Tablets, yeah, but Fire TV?

  • FFS....Why?!? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Somervillain ( 4719341 ) on Friday February 02, 2024 @07:43PM (#64209692)
    Maintaining an OS is hard work, especially keeping it patched and modern. Android is already free and open source, so they don't save any money. Amazon devices are already loss leaders with no profit margin. How long before these end up being bot farm tools? Does Amazon have any incentive to maintain this and keep them from being attacked? What is with big tech and reinventing the wheel? Precisely what do they get that they can't get from Linux or Android?

    • Precisely what do they get that they can't get from Linux or Android?

      ... I dunno, maybe a bot farm?

    • Re:FFS....Why?!? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Friday February 02, 2024 @08:02PM (#64209724) Homepage Journal

      Maintaining an OS is hard work, especially keeping it patched and modern.

      Amazon doesn't exactly keep their Android version up-to-date. Their latest tabled operating system, Fire OS 8, is still based on Android 11 (2020). If they can't even do that, what hope do they have of maintaining an entire OS?

      Android is already free and open source, so they don't save any money. Amazon devices are already loss leaders with no profit margin. How long before these end up being bot farm tools? Does Amazon have any incentive to maintain this and keep them from being attacked? What is with big tech and reinventing the wheel? Precisely what do they get that they can't get from Linux or Android?

      I'm with you. I don't understand what they could possibly gain, unless perhaps they want to go into console gaming and prevent people from side-loading Android games so they can monopolize the app market.

      NIH is real.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        I'm with you. I don't understand what they could possibly gain, unless perhaps they want to go into console gaming and prevent people from side-loading Android games so they can monopolize the app market.

        Chances are Amazon wants to move away from Android as they're fed up with people using their devices (subsidized by Amazon, most likely) as generic Android streaming boxes by sideloading stuff. There's probably an industry taking Amazon devices and turning them into pirate streaming boxes.

        That's about the o

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dgatwood ( 11270 )

          Chances are Amazon wants to move away from Android as they're fed up with people using their devices (subsidized by Amazon, most likely) as generic Android streaming boxes by sideloading stuff.

          That's plausible. On the flip side, if those folks made up more than a tiny percentage of the people buying their devices, their sales may plunge, and if they are just a tiny percentage of the people buying their devices, then it doesn't make much sense for that to be the driving reason behind a major technology shift.

          I'm not saying it's not the reason, but if it is, then it doesn't sound like a very good reason.

    • I would guess Terms of Service with Android. Android does not cost money however to use it, Amazon has to abide with Google's terms. I would guess that Amazon wants to do things like farm and sell every bit of data they can with their TVs that using Android will not allow them to do. So Amazon thinks that data is more valuable than the maintaining their own OS. Time will tell.

    • Maintaining an OS is hard work, especially keeping it patched and modern

      So making the OS skin as thin a layer as possible is a distinct advantage. Valve does just fine with the thin skin they call SteamOS. The key again is to keep the skin thin, and push anything suitable to push back upstream for somebody else to keep it shiny and make it better while you get on with whatever your core competency actually is.

  • Performance is going to be atrocious going from real native apps to interpreted js interfacing with native controls.
    It works on the PC reasonably well, but the FireTV devices are already underpowered.

    • c.f. the HTML5 interface that Palm developed - webOS on LG televisions. The original Palm Pre ran on a Cortex A8 with 256MB.

      A lightweight OS mainly displaying 4K content via hardware codecs, is Javascript really a bottleneck?

      Unless you're gaming via transpiled WASM or running VS Code on your telly...

  • Walmart has 4K GoogleTV devices for $20 or so running Android 13 and many TV's have it built in.

    Why would I buy a FireTV device anymore?

    They were cool in 2014, that's true.

  • In my experience, Amazon's software quality for consumer products has been pretty poor... most of their apps are glitchy, inconsistent, and ugly. If I don't trust their crappy music app to work reliably, why would I trust their OS? This seems like a poorly thought-out idea but, that said, I don't see a problem with taking market share away from Google.

  • It's all about spamming ads and not having to share the information and revenue.
  • ...OSMC or Kodi? There are plenty of Linux-based media player oriented OS' to choose from already. Why build another one? Why not do what Android has done & develop an existing FOSS project into something that's useful for everyone but without the tight, exclusive corporate control & bloat? Or is that they want to control a small wedge of the market from start to finish, i.e. content creation, distribution, & consumer devices, like Apple Inc.? I think this kind of approach makes life a lot less
  • Don't use Fire stick anymore and don't remember why ??? lolol Actually no one in my family uses it any more. Kinda like Roku, used to be good, but lost most of the free channels. Everything's pay for view.
  • The developers of the existing apps have a hard enough time already. Now they must maintain three different apps: Android, iOS, and VegaOS? No thanks.
  • Some major streamingservices are still not even supporting their current Android based FireTV, but luckily most of those androidTV based apps can be sideloaded onto the FireTV. But if they go with their own OS, that won't be happening. I know that I won't be buying a new FireTV device if I can't run my favorite 'homebrew' apps like Movian or even less of the major streamingservices.

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